Android emulator not showing in Visual Studio

Question

I made an Android Virtual Device. It runs on the SDK emulator using Intel HAXM. I was able to see it in Visual studio (debug devices drop down list) and debug my applicatio

Answer 1

For me on VS 2017 it was a matter of my user not being an admin. The issue is that unless the ANDROID_SDK_HOME environment variable is set it will create a .android folder in the %userprofile% directory and visual studio uses that to look for emulated devices. But when AVD is run as an administrator it uses whatever admin profile you use for admin priveledges and uses the .android folder under that user for managing emulated devices.

Following the link shows a guide on how to set the environmental variable so that all users look in the same location for emulated devices.

https://www.mysysadmintips.com/windows/clients/761-move-android-studio-avd-folder-to-a-new-location