Reputation: 597

Android emulator shows nothing but blank screen

I am a complete beginner to Android programming and trying my hands at it for the first time by going through the tutorials. The problem is that I have created multiple emulators using Android 4.4.2 API and none of them show anything but blank screen.

I tried an AVD with Google API 19, but that's not working either. How can I figure out what's wrong with it?

Upvotes: 19

Answers (17)

Shallon Ogden

Reputation: 1

Switch to software acceleration and it should fix it.

Upvotes: 0

Trishan Piumal

Reputation: 1

First Solution

Go to your source project file and remove these files and folders

 .gradle/
 .idea/
 .iml/
 build

Then close and reopen your project. After that try to build and run.

Second solution

Tools -> AVD Manager -> select your virtual device -> right click -> Wipe data

Upvotes: 0

Moritz E

Reputation: 11

I had the Problem with black screen plus audio fail messages with a newly installed Android Studio 3.4.1 on a fairly new amd machine. so i installed arm based virtual devices, used the Nexus 4 API 15 on targed 4.0.3 (Google API) as recommended for a first start.

I changed windows settings -> privacy -> microphone-> let other apps use it to fix the failing audio messages.

for the black screen all the above suggestions didnt work for me, until i changed the settings on extended controls once the black screened virtual device comes up:

went to settings -> advanced and changed both "OpenGL ES renderer" and "OpenGL ES API level" to "Desktop native OpenGL" and "Compatibility" respectively.

a word of caution, the devices seem to be very fragile and get corrupted when changing stuff back and forth in avd manager, especially when changing system image.

Upvotes: 1

AmirHossein Parsapour

Reputation: 163

I had the same problem in win10 64bit, too. After a lot of searching, I found this solution.(If you're using an intel system(CPU, GPU, Motherboard, etc.)) Hope it work for you, too.

step 1: Make sure virtualization is enabled on your device:

Reboot your computer and then press F2 for BIOS setup. You should find Virtualization tag and make sure it is marked as enabled. If it's not enabled, no virtual devices can run on your device.

step 2: Install/Update Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager(Intel HAXM) on your device:

This software should be installed or updated for any AVDs to run. You can download the latest version by googling "HAXM". After download, install .exe file and reboot your computer.

Upvotes: 2

kwriter

Reputation: 301

Sounds like there are many possible solutions so here's how I solved my black emulator screen after something (Gradle?) updated in Android Studio:

Change the AVD's Graphics setting to "Software - GLES 2.0"

Link to my full answer of a related question with a screenshot: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48287265/6343114

Update: so far, this isn't working on Play Store-enabled devices, because the Graphics setting can't be changed

Upvotes: 1

Krunal Kapadiya

Reputation: 3073

I have recently the same issue in emulator, Nexus 5 (Android O). I have go to Android Virtual Device Manager and Wipe User Data and it solved my Problem.

Upvotes: 2

pcforgeek

Reputation: 443

I just started with android development recently and I had the problem with emulator showing black screen even when I was using software GPU acceleration. On executing the following command in tools folder in Sdk folder of Android

 $./emulator -accel-check

The output which is given below showed that KVM was installed correctly and was usable.

    accel: 
    0
    KVM (version 12) is installed and usable.
    accel

So I installed the following packages

$ sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin ubuntu-vm-builder bridge-utils ia32-libs-multiarch

As I use Manjaro I didn't find all the packages in software repo. I was able to find only the following packages

qemu
libvirt
bridge-utils

Installing these helped me run AVD in both software and hardware GPU accleration.

Source: - https://developer.android.com/studio/run/emulator-acceleration.html

Upvotes: 1

Thatguywhohadthisproblem

Reputation: 11

If you got it to run the first time after installation but couldn't get it to run again it might be because you have virtualization disabled. Go into your BIOS and enable it. This is also on the FAQS of andyroid on installation.

Upvotes: 1

JRun

Reputation: 3428

Tried all of the above. What eventually worked, was a combination of using software based graphics rendering, in combination of 'older' device images (nexus 7 works, nexus 10 doesn't). Go figure. And yeah, it's very slow.

Upvotes: 0

Keyur Sanghvi

Reputation: 11

I think your problem is that your application emulator doesn't start because of your RAM storage, maybe you need to create a device with very low resolution.

Upvotes: 1

abhi

Reputation: 621

I had the same problem on Macbook pro mid 2012 model with 4 GB RAM and intel core i5 processor, deleted the AVD and created new AVD.
While creating new AVD in the advanced options -->hardware configurations set memory as 512 MB and selected Use Host GPU option.
On launching AVD received the error with some package, was prompted for auto update of this package and worked for me with charm after that.

Upvotes: 1

Pellet

Reputation: 2437

I managed to fix this problem by manually re-installing HAXM. I think Android Studio screwed the install up. You can run the installer(.DMG) from this directory inside your Android SDK directory:

/extras/intel/Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager/

Upvotes: 1

Paul Fröhling

Reputation: 111

I had this problem with a emulator running Android with API Level 14. I solved it by reducing the memory, the emulator uses. At the beginning it was set to about 1 GB and when I set it to 256MB everything was fine.

Upvotes: 1

JeffB6688

Reputation: 3880

Mac Users: Unfortunately, if you have an older Mac (late 2009 for example) and are using Yosemite, you cannot use HAXM for 64 bit architecture. According to the release notes on HAXM:

HAXM driver does not support emulating a 64 bit system image on Intel systems based on Core microarchitecture (Core, Core2 Duo etc.). All systems based on Nehalem and beyond are supported. (Corei3, Core i5 and Core i7 machines).

I spent a day trying to figure this problem out when I came upon this quote. The only thing that works is to use the non-x86 version of the latest OS (e.g. Lollipop Android 5.0.1 armeabi-v7a) in your AVD

Upvotes: 6