Android emulator process "not responding" after a while in M1 pro

Question

Since I switched to a new Macbook M1 pro, my android emulator gets unresponsive after a while by showing the "wheel of death" ie. the apple's loading indicator. I have to kill the process via activity monitor in order to restart this.

qemu-system-aarch64 (Not Responding) Is showing in activity Monitor`

This happens with any image of arm64-v8a and tried several Android APIs as well as different OpenGL ES options in emu-settings

This is almost happening in every session of use.

I sometimes noticed the issue right after I switch desktops or applications in my mac.

• Android Emulator 32.1.10
• Apple m1 pro 2021
• MacOs Monterery 12.6.3
• 32GB RAM

Any ideas?

Merilee

After trying many things...I found out that this issue goes away when I use the emulator inside the Android Studio instance. ie "Launch in a tool window" option in Preferences ticked – Merilee

Personally I prefer to have it on separate window, it would be nice to have a solution for that. Happens also on Apple M1 Pro, 32GB, macOS 13.2.1, android emulator 32.1.11 – Orfinger

Yeah, i tried update everything, but it does not work. Also i noticed that it happening after changing desktop view – Brassbound

I think you can temporarily downgrade emulator to the 31.3.14 version, the issue shouldn't be reproduced there. You can see more details here developer.android.com/studio/emulator_archive – Leguminous

Answer 1

Had same problem with MacBook Air M2 base model (Android emulator used to become unresponsive just after few mins of usage while doing android app development using flutter), in my case I did the following things :-

1. Increased the storage of my AVD (Android emulator) from the android studio "Device manager" setting.
2. Under the "Device manager" I changed "Graphics: Automatic" to "Graphics: Hardware - GLES 2.0"

Now for me it just works fine and just remember one thing if your are using it for Android development task I would recommend to wipe the data of the Android virtual machine from android studio "Device manager" setting as soon as its storage is around 80% full.

Simsar

This unfortunately did not help me – Xerox

Answer 2

This is very weird. I followed the advice of the comment thread above and yes, after trying many things, I also found out that this issue goes away when I use the emulator inside the Android Studio instance. ie "Launch in a tool window" option in Preferences ticked! Thank you @gemini

Xerox