| name | argent-android-emulator-setup |
| description | Set up and connect to an Android emulator using argent MCP tools. Use when starting a new session on Android, booting an emulator, getting a device serial, or before any UI interaction task. |
1. Prerequisites
- Android SDK Platform Tools on PATH — provides
adb.
- Android Emulator on PATH — needed to boot AVDs. If you will only use an already-running emulator or a physical device, adb alone is sufficient.
- An AVD created via Android Studio or
avdmanager create avd.
Verify with adb version and emulator -list-avds.
2. Setup
- Find a ready device — call
list-devices. Filter for entries with platform: "android". Ready devices (state: "device") come first. Pick the first serial (e.g. emulator-5554) unless the user specified one.
- Boot if needed — if nothing Android is ready, call
boot-device with avdName: <name> from the same call's avds list. The tool transparently picks hot vs cold boot: it probes the AVD's default_boot snapshot, restores it under a tight deadline when usable, and falls back to a full cold boot otherwise. Hot path is typically ~30s; cold path takes 2–10 min. On any stage failure the tool kills the emulator process it started so your next call starts from a clean state.
- Metro (for React Native) — once a device is up, run
adb -s <serial> reverse tcp:8081 tcp:8081 so the device can reach Metro on your host. Repeat if the device restarts. See the argent-metro-debugger skill.
3. Using the device
Pass the Android serial as udid to the unified interaction tools — gesture-tap, gesture-swipe, describe, screenshot, launch-app, keyboard, etc. Dispatch is automatic based on the id shape. See argent-device-interact for platform-neutral interaction tooling and the Android-specific gotchas section at the bottom of that skill.
4. Notes
- Android TV / leanback AVDs boot through this exact flow (same
boot-device + avdName), but they are focus-driven, not touch-driven — do not use gesture-tap/gesture-swipe on them. list-devices tags a leanback device with runtimeKind: "tv" (detected via the system feature list, not the serial — a TV AVD's serial looks just like a phone's). When you see runtimeKind: "tv", drive it with the focus-driven tools (describe / tv-remote / keyboard) and the argent-tv-interact skill (it covers Android TV as well as Apple TV, including the full TV setup flow).
- Serials are the adb device id. iOS UDIDs and Android serials are not interchangeable, but you do NOT need to tell the tools which platform — dispatch is automatic.
describe on Android returns a shallower tree than iOS (no accessibility-service equivalent), but covers most tap-target discovery.reinstall-app on Android always installs with -g so first-launch runtime permissions are pre-granted.- To stop the emulator, run
adb -s <serial> emu kill from a shell (clean shutdown). Never pkill -9/kill -9 qemu — a hard kill leaves the userdata image dirty, after which cold boots can hang for many minutes doing recovery (runaway writes, boot_completed never flips). If an image gets into that state, boot once with -wipe-data to reset it.
