Android Emulator Setup

Installing android studio is not for the purposes of using it for app development, it's simply to use its android emulator functionality. It's a flavor of Intellij for App development in Kotlin/Java, we're using Javascript via React Native so we don't need the heavy Android Studio Editor for our development needs.

Once you have it installed create an empty project, as for some reason android studio requires you do this to access the AVD Manager -- the only tool from android studio we actually need. It stands for the Android Virtual Device Manager and lets you run Android in an emulator via qEMU.

Once you have the blank app open, close it again immediately. File >> Close Project

You should be greeted with a menu like this:

Go to the top right of this menu where the kebab menu is and click it. You should get a dialogue which includes the AVD Manager and SDK Manager

We're going to start with the SDK Manager. Open it and match your checked boxes with mine:

This will require you to accept all sorts of agreements and download a lot of libraries and the emulator itself.

Now we can go back to the kebab menu and open the AVD Manager

You should be greeted with a menu like this (I already have some created) Go ahead and click create device. Use whatever virtual device you want, it doesn't matter. I usually use the pixel options

Next you have to select the system image, this is effectively the version of android your emulator will run. This needs to be downloaded (quite large) I usually use the latest release version which is currently Android S. You will need to click the blue hyperlink download next to your desired image before it will let you select it.

Next setup details about the device, these are the ones I suggest, which make it start in landscape mode (app is developed for landscape mode) and disables the device frame which just wastes monitor real estate.

Now click finish and you have a virtual phone!

Click the play button in the menu to start it up.

We won't need to do this every time, Expo can start the emulator for us once we have it installed. It'll always open the last emulator you had open though, so if you want to switch the emulator in use you will have to use the AVD Manager again.