How to make system partition in AVD in emulator writable

Question

This is fairly a very old question but I am surprised that none of the solutions are working for me. I need to run an android app as system app in an AVD (in emulator) creat

Answer 1

When working with Q, this is the only solution that worked for me: https://stackoverflow.com/a/64397712/1898527

Adding here the steps for completion (kudos to the original author):

> emulator -avd Pixel_3a_XL_API_29 -writable-system
> adb shell avbctl disable-verification
> adb disable-verity

Now reboot your emulator so that the changes take effect.

> adb root
> adb remount
> adb shell "su 0 mount -o rw,remount /system"

Note: you will need an emulator without Google Play, otherwise this won't work. You can get it by following the steps described here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/45668555/1898527

Answer 2

In my case, I use a avd( Based on: Android 8.0 (Oreo) Tag/ABI: google_apis/x86_64 ).

$ emulator -avd Nexus_5X_API_26_APIs -writable-system 
$ adb root 
$ adb remount

Then, /system is writeable.

$ adb push somefile /system/bin/ is work.

Answer 3

use genymotion emulator, which is faster, light weight and pre rooted. (which means you can access system directory)

Answer 4

For the benefit of others, answer to the question was answered a long ago by @Ishamael in another stackoverflow question Read only file system on Android