This has to be one of the most frustrating problems I’ve ever seen.

Basically, I have started with a fresh installation of Eclipse, Android SDK, ADT plugin and so on, and with the Hello World app, in order to setup a working environment. I don’t really understand why, but I have encountered a problem where the emulator simply does not want to load the app. Loading the app on an actual device hooked up with USB works fine, only the emulator causes problems.

There are a lot of suggestions out there, but none of them helped me:

  • Run emulator from Start menu (and not from Eclipse), and then Run your app
  • Turn off UAC
  • Be patient because emulator knows to start up really slow, and use the Snapshot feature

The workaround that works for me is this one (stackoverflow.com question answered). Let’s repeat what’s been said there in my own words.

When you have your app ready, and you want to run it in emulator, you go to ‘Run->Run’, and you see emulator loading. When it loads, it loads locked, and after unlocking it does not show your app. The log is clean, and shows no errors.

Now, open up your Task Manager, and end the ‘adb.exe’ (Android Debug Bridge) process.

The next step is to start your app (Run->Run) again, without closing the already running emulator. Now, depending on whether you chose the AVD to run manually or automatically (I use the manually option), you should get a screen asking you whether to use the already running emulator, or to start a new one. Use the already running one, and now your app should load just fine.

And that should be it.

Hopefully this helped you, and hopefully it will help me in the future when setting up a fresh environment.