How to create an AVD for Android 4.0

Question

Android 4.0 is now released. I have just updated my ADT plugin and downloaded the 4.0 SDK. But when I try to create an AVD for Android 4.0, Eclipse tells me 'Unable to find a 'userdata.img' file for ABI armeabi to copy into the AVD folder'.

I found d:\android-sdk-windows\platforms\android-14 missing the 'images' folder which other versions have. This folder may have 'userdata.img' that create an AVD should have.

Where should I to get 'userdata.img', and how do I create an AVD for Android 4.0?

Answer 1

This answer is for creating AVD in Android Studio.

1. First click on AVD button on your Android Studio top bar.

2. In this window click on Create Virtual Device

3. Now you will choose hardware profile for AVD and click Next.

4. Choose Android Api Version you want in your AVD. Download if no api exist. Click next.

5. This is now window for customizing some AVD feature like camera, network, memory and ram size etc. Just keep default and click Finish.

6. You AVD is ready, now click on AVD button in Android Studio (same like 1st step). Then you will able to see created AVD in list. Click on Play button on your AVD.

7. Your AVD will start soon.

Answer 2

If you installed the system image and still get this error, it might be that the Android SDK manager did not put the files in the right folder for the AVD manager. See an answer to Stack Overflow question How to create an AVD for Android 4.0.3? (Unable to find a 'userdata.img').

Answer 3

This site Android Create AVD shows you how to install the latest version of the Android SDK and AVD version 4 in Eclipse with video and screenshots if you're still stuck?

Answer 4

You can also get this problem if you have your Android SDK version controlled. You get a slightly different error:

Unable to find a 'userdata.img' file for ABI .svn to copy into the AVD folder.

For some reason, the Android Virtual Device (AVD) manager believes the .svn folder is specifying an application binary interface (ABI). It looks for userdata.img within the .svn folder and can't find it, so it fails.

I used the shell extension found in the responses for the Stack Overflow question Removing .svn files from all directories to remove all .svn folders recursively from the android-sdk folder. After this, the AVD manager was able to create an AVD successfully. I have yet to figure out how to get the SDK to play nicely with Subversion.

Answer 5

Another solution, for those of us without an internet connection to our development machine is:

Create a folder called system-images in the top level of your SDK directory (next to platforms and tools). Create subdirs android-14 and android-15 (as applicable). Extract the complete armeabi-v7a folder to these directory; sysimg_armv7a-15_r01.zip (from, e.g. google's repository) goes to android-15, sysimg_armv7a-14_r02.zip to android-14.

I've not tried this procedure offline, I finally relented and used my broadband allowance at home, but these are the target locations for these large sysimg's, for future reference.

I've tried creating the image subdirs where they were absent in 14 and 15 but while this allowed the AVD to create an image (for 15 but not 14) it hadn't shown the Android logo after 15 minutes.

Answer 6

I had a similar problem but using IntelliJ IDEA rather than Eclipse. I already had the ARM EABI installed, but I still got the error.

For IntelliJ IDEA, it appears you also have to create an AVB first before running the emulator, so to do this you must just go into Android SDK Manager and create a new AVB. This should solve your problem... Please make sure you have followed the above answer to include the ARM before following these steps.

Answer 7

I just did the same. If you look in the "Android SDK Manager" in the "Android 4.0 (API 14)" section you'll see a few packages. One of these is named "ARM EABI v7a System Image".

This is what you need to download in order to create an Android 4.0 virtual device: