Installing Android Market App on Emulator

Question

Hi Guys i want to install android Market App on Emulator, so that i can browse and install various free apps on emulators. Can you guide me how to do this?

Answer 1

I have used BlueStacks for testing Android apps.

"Use all 750,000 Mobile Apps on PC or Mac"

Free download, it works fine, not sure about stuff like Angry Birds, but for testing some advanced custom APK's it was nice.

http://www.bluestacks.com/

(It has been a few months, I had forgotten the name and just had a need for one tonight so I started digging, seen a few SO threads and wanted to drop a line.)

Answer 2

Look at this - might be what you're looking for

Answer 3

If you have a web server somewhere, simply upload the apk to your web server,

before firing up your emulator, please check the device configuration on your AVD and ensure that the SD card option is enabled and a reasonable amount of space is allocated. this is very important because your app would be installed on this virtual SD card.

Fire up your emulator, then launch the default browswer.

from the browser, visit the location where the app was uploaded to. here is an example lets assume foo as the domain and bar.apk as the name of the apk file. assuming the apk file was uploaded to the root of your server, you will be visiting http://www.foo.com/bar.apk ... doing this will cause the file to be downloaded to your android emulator and you should be able to install it from there.

Answer 4

Pull the apk from a real device and then install it on the emulator. Check adb sdk tool for command line options.

Answer 5

Android market application cannot be directly downloaded to a computer. But there may be some alternative sites that provide the .apk file of the application. Search in Google. If you got that .apk file downloaded in your system, you can easily install that by the following steps. I usually do like this.

• First of all copy the .apk file to the android sdk --> 'platform-tools' directory

• To start the emulator use type the following command on your terminal

  cd /path_to_android_sdk/platform-tools // press enter

  then type the following to start the emulator

  emulator -avd <emulator_name> // press enter

<emulator_name> is the name that you have given when you first created that emulator. If you don't know that name, go to eclipse and click window-->Avd and Sdk manager. On that window you can see the AVD name.

After that wait for a couple of minutes so that the emulator starts. After that, unlock the emulator:

• Open another tab in terminal or open another terminal and type the following commands

  cd /path_to_android_sdk/platform-tools; ls //press enter

  Now you should see your application name.

  adb install <name_of_the_apk> // press enter ./adb install <name_of_the_apk> // for MAC machine

After that you can see a success message.

• Eventually press on the menu launcher button on the emulator where you can see your application installed. Click on the icon to launch that application.