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)

Market on Emulator

So, finally, we have Android Market on our emulators. Now, since it is possible, a developer can create any number of emulators with the android market on it, and login to different google accounts, and try to increase his app's ratings. This is actually too dangerous. Google doesn't discriminate requests from market apps on such emulators, and still accepts ratings and reviews. I don't know how Google can now stop this, since, everybody and anybody can now have access to the market place from his emulator. But, I am happy, :) Till Google takes any steps to curb this backdoor entry through the emulators, we can obviously expect some of those comments/reviews on the apps to be just spam. :( Google market has got to do something to stop this, and probably they will.

Android Market on Emulator

Wow, This is cool. Finally, I am able to run the Android Market on the emulator. And also, see all the paid apps and copy-protected app, right here on my emulator.

What do you need?

Well, the basic SDK. 1.5, 1.6 or 1.1

And then, go to the HTC website where you can find the images/recovery images. Download the version (system image only) which you want to run.

http://developer.htc.com/google-io-device.html#s3
(Download the System Image zip)

Extract the files of this zip. There's a system.img file which you will need in the next steps.

Create an AVD (1.1, 1.5 or 1.6) depending on your requirements.

Copy this system.img file into the avd directory. For example, if you created an avd named "MyPhone", go to .avd\MyPhone\ and paste this system.img file here.

Now start the emulator. Voila, You are ready to go. After you sign in with a google account, your phone is ready to use. You now have access to all the market apps right from your emulator.

Note: If you are not able to run it successfully, and if you are getting Network communication error, please download the AVD that I have created from this link.

Link for 1.5 image
www.4shared.com/file/147420185/da5381e1/avd.html

Link for 1.6 image
http://www.4shared.com/file/165624746/fc72c3ed/system.html