Android Studio emulator does not come with Play Store for API 23

Question

I selected this emulator from the newest version of Android Studio AVD.

I have selected the latest version of android API 23. Because it says "with Google APIs", I thought that it would actually include all the Google apps, including Play Store so that I can install apps like Facebook.

I have seen other threads on SO which seems to be outdated now (How to install Google Play app in Android Studio emulator?), this one gives instructions for installing Google apps based on universal packages but it only goes up to Android 4.3 API 18: http://wiki.rootzwiki.com/Google_Apps#Universal_Packages_2

I would like the one for API 23. Is there a way to install the Google Apps package on the emulator?

It seems strange that the official android emulator doesn't come standard with all the google apps in the first place...This doesn't seem very supportive of google and would potential mean developers will have to buy actual devices to develop for API 23?

Answer 1

I've had to do this recently on the API 23 emulator, and followed this guide. It works for API 23 emulator, so you shouldn't have a problem.

Note: All credit goes to the author of the linked blog post (pyoor). I'm just posting it here in case the link breaks for any reason.

....

Download the GAPPS Package

Next we need to pull down the appropriate Google Apps package that matches our Android AVD version. In this case we’ll be using the 'gapps-lp-20141109-signed.zip' package. You can download that file from BasketBuild here.

[pyoor@localhost]$ md5sum gapps-lp-20141109-signed.zip
367ce76d6b7772c92810720b8b0c931e gapps-lp-20141109-signed.zip

In order to install Google Play, we’ll need to push the following 4 APKs to our AVD (located in ./system/priv-app/):

GmsCore.apk, GoogleServicesFramework.apk, GoogleLoginService.apk, Phonesky.apk

[pyoor@localhost]$ unzip -j gapps-lp-20141109-signed.zip 
system/priv-app/GoogleServicesFramework/GoogleServicesFramework.apk 
system/priv-app/GoogleLoginService/GoogleLoginService.apk 
system/priv-app/Phonesky/Phonesky.apk 
system/priv-app/GmsCore/GmsCore.apk -d ./

Push APKs to the Emulator

With our APKs extracted, let’s launch our AVD using the following command.

[pyoor@localhost tools]$ ./emulator @<YOUR_DEVICE_NAME> -no-boot-anim

This may take several minutes the first time as the AVD is created. Once started, we need to remount the AVDs system partition as read/write so that we can push our packages onto the device.

[pyoor@localhost]$ cd ~/android-sdk/platform-tools/
[pyoor@localhost platform-tools]$ ./adb remount

Next, push the APKs to our AVD:

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

Profit!

And finally, reboot the emualator using the following commands:

[pyoor@localhost platform-tools]$ ./adb shell stop && ./adb shell start

Once the emulator restarts, 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.