Thursday, January 13, 2011

Android Market on Emulator (2.2)

It's been some time that I had tried getting the Market up and running on a 2.2 a.k.a Froyo emulator. On a previous post, I had described how to setup an emulator (1.5 and 1.6) with the Market app. Today, I got a comment on that post which points to a 2.2 image that does the same. You just have to download that image file and follow exactly the same steps to set it up.

This is the link to the system.img file. Thanks Anonymous for your contribution. I have tried this, and it works. Here's a link (David's Blog) that anonymous referred to. He has described all the steps to create this system image needed to put the Market app on emulator.

A few things: 
- This image will only work on a 2.2 emulator
- While creating the emulator, you should specify the cache partition size as 96 MB.

Check out the previous post for more details.

There are however a few limitations that I found with this hack.
  1. The Android Market app doesn't seem to update itself to the new UI that we currently have on our phones.
  2. There are only a limited number of apps that show up on the Market. (No Angry Birds for example)

20 comments:

  1. This is awsome
    But is there a way to make the CPU and GPU better in the emulator?

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  2. Thanks for posting this! Would be nice if Firefox was an available download though ;-)

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  3. Thanks for putting up this post. Was very useful. Small tidbit - apps like angry birds seem to be disabled in the market because the device does not have certain capabilities. Go ahead and add GPS support, accelerometer, touch screen etc and most apps will show up.

    Cheers,
    Krishna

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  4. @Krishna: Perhaps you are right. But I don't need to have market on emulator right now. I have a few devices with me. :)

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  5. Thanks a lot for this. But I'm not able to connect to internet after I paste the system.img and start my emulator. Before then I was able to connect. What I doing wrong. Also do i have to do the build.prop pull done by the OP in his blog?

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  6. Hi all

    Is .swf or .flv video file run on Android emulator. If yes please suggest steps for running live video streaming.

    Thanks
    awinash

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  7. I don't think you will be able to run them. I mean, using the default system images, which don't come with flash support.

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  8. flash videos run on the emulator
    for eg youtube
    but only on the phone's browser

    ***not on external browsers***
    for eg opera

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  9. I got access to the Android Market 2.2 using that image file above, but apparently I don't have root access using the emulator, which I need to if I want to copy some apk files.

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  10. HI

    " Go ahead and add GPS support, accelerometer, touch screen etc and most apps will show up."

    This makes sense, but how do you do this on an emulator?

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  11. " Go ahead and add GPS support, accelerometer, touch screen etc and most apps will show up."
    you do this through the sdk and avd manager.
    select your virtual device and click on 'edit'. then click 'new' in the hardware box.

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  12. I still can't get the games to show up despite enabling hardware options. Does the rom version have anything to do with this? I'm using r24 instead of r22 in the instructions because the link to r22 is no longer valid.

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  13. Same here.
    I somehow managed to set it up once so the market worked.
    But can't reproduce now. Killed a day already. Please help!
    The market is available. When accepted terms/conditions, it crashes. All consequent attempts result in "No matching content in Android Market". HELP!

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  14. Ok, it's great and it's work! but...

    Android works better on VirtualBox - much faster. Is there any way to get Market on VB?

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  15. I am getting this message too:
    "No matching content in Android Market"

    Somebody got this working?

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  16. ----------
    Anonymous said...

    I am getting this message too:
    "No matching content in Android Market"

    Somebody got this working?
    ---------
    Ditto

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  17. use sdk r10 works great

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  18. Thanks a million - my phone died last week, still waiting for a replacement. This is a lifesaver. Works great!

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  19. Thanks for the system image. I found many other articles describing one procedure or another to run the market inside the emulator, but with no attached image, I always failed to get the same results they obtained by following their described procedure.
    There's still one small annoyance however. If I restart the emulator(or simply exit the market and enter it again), it doesn't display results for my search(just saying that it found 543 matches or so, but without displaying any). It seems the market runs properly only once. The workaround I'm following to overcome this shortcoming so far, is to restart the emulator with -wipe-data(from the command line) so that the google account registration wizard runs again. Only this makes the market work properly again(but for one time only also).

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