Add an 'Run Android App in Simulator' button

In SAB you can quickly access Xcode’s simulator from within SAB by clicking the ‘Run iOS App in Simulator’ button. Can you add this same type of button for Android apps so that we won’t have to open Android Studio and hunt for the simulator?

With SAB for Mac, Xcode is an installation requirement and the iOS Simulator is known to be there.

For Android, there are several different options for emulators so we can’t launch your emulator. Many emulators allow you to drag/drop the APK file onto the emulator window to install. There is a File -> View APK Output Folder menu option to easily get the the folder where the build APK is located.

There is another option for Android, although it can be a little tricky to get setup. In the Settings, there is a tab named “After Build”:

The emulator can be used as well as a device for this setting. I have used this with Geny Motion. I did have to change the ADB settings in Geny Motion to use the same Android SDK that is specified in SAB.

You can verify that this will work by starting a terminal and running adb devices while the emulator is running and see if an entry shows up.

$ PUT_THE_PATH_TO_ANDROID_SDK_HERE/platform-tools/adb devices
List of devices attached
192.168.56.103:5555	device

On my machine, it looked like:

$ /Users/hubbard/android/android-sdk/platform-tools/adb devices
List of devices attached
192.168.56.103:5555	device

The “After Build” setting will not work if there is more than 1 device listed.

I hope this helps…
Chris

As for starting the emulator from Android Studio, I found this documentation:
Starting the emulator from the command line