You opened AVD Manager in Android Studio and tried to start an AVD, you got “Emulator: Process finished with exit code 1”. Following are the steps to debug this

1. Find out the name of the emulator. Click the down arrow 🔽 which is to the right of play arrow ▶️, to find out the name of the AVD. Let’s say the name is “Nexus_5X_API_28_x86”.

2. Try starting the AVD directly from command-line It fails with another cryptic error, but that’s at least more actionable

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   $(dirname $(which android))/emulator -avd Nexus_5X_API_28_x86 ... PANIC: Broken AVD system path. Check your ANDROID_SDK_ROOT value [/opt/android_sdk]!

   Let’s retry in the verbose mode to see a detailed error

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   $(dirname $(which android))/emulator -avd Nexus_5X_API_28_x86 -verbose ... Not a directory: /opt/android_sdk/system-images/android-28/google_apis/x86/

   So, the system image is missing.

3. Install system image

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   # List all possible system images. $(dirname $(which android))/bin/sdkmanager --list # List the images we are interested in. $(dirname $(which android))/bin/sdkmanager --list | ack google_apis | ack android-28 | ack x86 # Install the right one using $(dirname $(which android))/bin/sdkmanager --install 'system-images;android-28;google_apis;x86'

4. Now try starting the AVD again.

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   $(dirname $(which android))/emulator -avd Nexus_5X_API_28_x86 -verbose ... emulator:Probing program: /opt/android_sdk/tools/emulator64-x86 emulator:Probing program: /opt/android_sdk/tools/emulator-x86 PANIC: Missing emulator engine program for 'x86' CPU.

   Turns out there is another version of the emulator installed in $(dirname $(dirname $(which android)))/emulator/emulator. And the emulator I was using is a stray one.

   1 2	# This works $(dirname $(dirname $(which android)))/emulator/emulator -avd Nexus_5X_API_28_x86 -verbose