With the addition of an ampersand, the AVD will run in the background and you’ll regain control of your terminal. You could open a new terminal tab or window to avoid this, but you could also try appending a & to the end of the command, which is a little Linux trick to run a process in the background. One important note: when you run the emulator command with the -avd flag, the process that controls the AVD remains active in your terminal - meaning, you are unable to type subsequent commands without killing the AVD. For example here’s how I run my Nexus 5X AVD using the emulator command. Once you have an AVD’s name, you can start up that AVD with the emulator command’s -avd option. For example, here’s what that command looks like when I run it on my Mac. The first option you’ll want to know is -list-avds, as it lists all AVDs you currently have configured. Launching Android AVDsĪs part of the Android SDK installation you get a command-line tool called emulator, which is the Google-blessed way to work with AVDs from the command line, and which has a number of options that let you do a wide range of things. In this article I’ll walk through how you can set up these commands on your own machine.

I named them ios-simulator and android-emulator, and here’s what they look like in action. So I spent a little time setting up commands that let me launch these tools from my terminal. I use the iOS Simulator and AVDs (Android Virtual Devices) heavily, and was getting frustrated with the need to manually launch the two from Xcode and Android Studio, respectively.

Start android emulator mac terminal