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Create, start, and manage Android emulators without opening Android Studio. emu works as a shorthand for emulator.

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emulator create

Create or update an Android emulator. Run it without arguments for interactive prompts:

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emulator delete

Delete one or more Android emulators:

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emulator images

Manage Android system images with the install, list, and delete subcommands:

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emulator list

List installed Android emulators:

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emulator start

Start an Android emulator. Run it without a name to pick one interactively:

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emulator status

Show the status of an Android emulator by name or serial:

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emulator stop

Stop a running Android emulator by name or serial:

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emulator tune

Apply the agent-friendly tweaks to a running Android emulator, by name or serial:
Tuning is opt-in: emulator start and emulator create --start only apply the tweaks when you pass --tune, which is non-interactive and applies all of them. Running tune on its own asks which tweaks to apply, with every one pre-selected so Enter applies the lot; -y skips that question.
Name the emulator in a script. Unlike device tune, emulator tune has no single-candidate shortcut: with no name or serial it opens an emulator picker whenever any emulator is running, one or many, and -y does not suppress it — that flag skips the tweak question only. With no emulator running it prints a hint and exits without tuning.
A name matching no running emulator is an error, and one matching more than one asks you to pass a serial instead. Physical device serials are refused here — use device tune for those, which does fall back to the only connected device and takes --device or --all.

Code samples on this page are subject to the Apache 2.0 license.

Last modified on October 26, 2026