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Is there a way to install Google Play app on an Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) AVD? I have found the Open Gapps for Android 6 here: https://www.androidfilehost.com/?fid=24269982087008996

To install them you need to boot into Recovery mode and install that zip file, but an emulator does not have a recovery partition, so the steps target the case of a device.

Do you know, how I can do the same for the emulator? I tried to unzip the file and put the 4 APKs described here (for Android version 5): http://www.flinkd.org/2015/02/instal...i-21-lollipop/

but after rebooting the emulator, although the icon of Google Play appears in the launcher, when I tap on it, then the emulator crashes with some fatal exceptions in logcat. I tried to install the packages one at a time, rebooting the emulator after each installation, and found out that the crash happens after installing the Phonesky.apk no matter if you click on the Google Play icon.

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  • Just an idea (untested): Check my app list for Custom Recovery & Flashing. Flashify was one of the apps intended to take-over such tasks from recovery, so one can flash without booting to recovery. Might work in an Emu as well.
    – Izzy
    Commented Dec 9, 2015 at 18:13
  • Thank you very much for the quick response. I will check it out! :)
    – Thanasis Petsas
    Commented Dec 9, 2015 at 19:50
  • Don't forget to update us with the results, please! :)
    – Izzy
    Commented Dec 9, 2015 at 20:23
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    Maybe the files in the zip contain errors. I will try some other zip files as well I found on other web pages. Logcat doesn't seem to provide enough information about this.. I will let you know.
    – Thanasis Petsas
    Commented Dec 10, 2015 at 0:03
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    Did you ever find a working solution?
    – Irvin H.
    Commented May 12, 2016 at 15:04

1 Answer 1

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1) Go get GApps for the emulator from http://opengapps.org

2) Unzip to get

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

Launch the emulator from the command line, on linux you do

./emulator [name] -no-boot-anim -writable-system

on windows it's probably 

emulator.exe [name] -no-boot-anim -writable-system

Make sure you have adb access to the emulator.

adb remount

last but not least, push everything to system.

adb push GmsCore.apk /system/priv-app/

(and repeat for all the other APKs)

then reboot with

adb shell stop

and

adb shell start
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    This does not work. This error appears all the time: adb: error: failed to copy 'Phonesky.apk' to '/system/priv-app/Phonesky.apk': Read-only file system. No remount in any way does help, as the output of every remount is the following: mount: Read-only file system. Yeah, thanks android, thats why I want to remount it with rw -.-
    – CharlyDelta
    Commented Jul 15, 2016 at 19:18
  • In the same boat as @ChristianDreher - can't write to the filesystem. adb remount succeeds, and pushing after that gets a little bit of the way then stops. I can't remount from an adb shell either. Any ideas?
    – askvictor
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 0:21
  • I've had this problem countless times in the past, and it astounds me that the solution isn't more widely known. Simply start the emulator with the -writable-system argument. Hey presto, writable system partition, and these instructions suddenly work.
    – Adrian
    Commented May 15, 2017 at 7:49
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    To avoid Read-only file system error you should start an emulator with -writable-system flag
    – Vadik Sirekanyan
    Commented Jul 4, 2017 at 22:42
  • 1
    Running emulator -shell open shell prompt with root permission
    – gavenkoa
    Commented Apr 16, 2018 at 21:54

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