Flinkd!

Updated (2-11-15): I’ve written a new post which describes installing Google Play on Android 5.x.  You can find that post, here.

Before I begin, I just want to mention that what I’m about to describe is by no means new. There are several other posts out there which describe how to install the Google Play packages under the Android Emulator. However, today I needed to create a new AVD for a project I’m working on and after searching for a few minutes, I realized that most of these posts are outdated and contain broken links to the appropriate Google apps. As such, I’ve decided to wikify it here.

This document outlines the steps required using the latest version of the Android SDK (Revision 22.3) and is focused on Android 4.3 (API 18). Although Android 4.4 (Kit Kat) is out at the time of writing, the appropriate Google Apps package is not yet publicly available.

With that, let’s begin by launching the SDK manager. We’ll first need to ensure that Android 4.3 (API 18) is installed.

[pyoor@localhost tools]$ ./android sdk

If not, check the top level element, “Android 4.3 (API 18)”, click “Install 6 Packages”, and accept the license agreement.

Once installed, close the SDK manager and launch the AVD manager. Here we’ll need to create a new AVD which utilizes the Android 4.3 platform and has snapshots enabled so that any changes we make are persistent.

[pyoor@localhost tools]$ ./android avd

Next we need to pull down the appropriate Google Apps package. Using Android 4.3 (API 18) we must use the “20130813” package. You can find that package at the Goo.im page.

Please note that this package will only work for Android 4.3. For earlier versions of Android, please see the RootzWiki here. A full listing of packages can be found here.

Once downloaded, extract the archive. In order to install Google Play, we’ll need to push the following 3 APKs to our AVD (located in ./system/app/):

• GoogleServicesFramework.apk
• GoogleLoginService.apk
• Phonesky.apk

However, before we do, we need to make some minor modifications to our AVD. Let’s launch the newly created AVD using the following command. Note that we’ve specified a partition size of 512MB. This is to ensure that our AVD has enough capacity to install the Google Play Store and its dependencies.

[pyoor@localhost tools]$ ./emulator -avd Test -partition-size 512 -no-boot-anim

This may take several minutes the first time as the AVD is created. Once started we need to remount the AVD’s partition and modify the permissions of “/system/app/” as this is where our packages will be installed to.

[pyoor@localhost platform-tools]$ ./adb remount
[pyoor@localhost platform-tools]$ ./adb shell chmod 777 /system/app/

And finally, we can push these APKs to our AVD:

[pyoor@localhost platform-tools]$ ./adb push ~/system/app/GoogleServicesFramework.apk /system/app/
[pyoor@localhost platform-tools]$ ./adb push ~/system/app/GoogleLoginService.apk /system/app/
[pyoor@localhost platform-tools]$ ./adb push ~/system/app/Phonesky.apk /system/app/

Now if your emulator is as slow as mine it may take a few minutes for the package to be installed. You’ll know if the installation hasn’t yet completed if the launcher process repeatedly crashes on you 😉

After a few minutes, we should see the Google Play package appear within the menu launcher. After associating a Google account with this AVD we now have a fully working version of Google Play running under our emulator: