Install / update the required Android SDK components including build-tools, platform-tools, platform (for the required API level), emulator and system-images (for the required API level).This action automates the process by doing the following: You can also achieve this on a self-hosted Linux runner, but it will need to be on a compatible instance that allows you to enable KVM - for example AWS EC2 Bare Metal instances. The macOS VM provided by GitHub Actions has HAXM installed so we are able to create a new AVD instance, launch an emulator with hardware acceleration, and run our Android If you want to learn more about this, here's an article I wrote: Running Android Instrumented Tests on CI.

This presents a challenge on CI as to be able to run hardware accelerated emulators within a docker container, KVM must be supported by the host VM which isn't the case for cloud-based CI providers due to infrastructural limits. The modern Intel Atom (x86 and x86_64) emulators require hardware acceleration (HAXM on Mac & Windows, QEMU on Linux) from the host to run fast.

The old ARM-based emulators were slow and are no longer supported by Google. A GitHub Action for installing, configuring and running hardware-accelerated Android Emulators on macOS virtual machines.

Mac android emulator acceleration