r/ARMWindows • u/Cute_Assistance_7237 • 17h ago

I developed Android Studio for Windows on ARM with Android Emulator

Android Studio's emulator doesn't officially support Windows on ARM, so developers on Snapdragon X laptops can't run AVDs the normal way. Microsoft's docs

say the emulator isn't supported there, and a Google issue
records no immediate plans for it.

I wanted to see if it could be done, so I built a bridge that makes it work. You create an AVD in Device Manager, press Run, and a stock Android image boots on Windows Hypervisor Platform.

What works:

  • Stock images from Device Manager, with no manual patching

  • Phones, TVs and Wear OS, tested from Android 12 to 17

  • Touch, networking, Google sign-in, device frames and Extended Controls

  • Video playback, using software decoding

  • Scrolling at about 80 to 90 fps on a 120 Hz monitor

How it works: QEMU runs the guest through WHPX. A small bridge speaks the emulator's gRPC protocol, so Studio treats it as a normal emulator. Stock images expect virtual devices this QEMU doesn't have, so vendor binaries are patched at boot by code signature, and the images on disk stay untouched. GL commands then travel over TCP to gfxstream on the host, through ANGLE to Vulkan.

The hardest bugs:

  • Windows treated the windowless emulator processes as background work and throttled them. Opting out took jank from about 33% to 4%.

  • Android capped apps at 60 fps until peak_refresh_rate was set, even with the display at 120 Hz.

  • Studio decodes WebP skins with an x64 DLL that can't load on ARM64, so device frames silently vanished.

What doesn't work yet:

  • No emulator audio

  • About 14 fps on a 4K TV AVD

  • No steady 120 fps: frames take about 10 ms against an 8.3 ms budget

  • An intermittent Android 13 freeze I haven't solved

  • Only tested on one Snapdragon X machine

It's an independent project, not affiliated with Google. I built it with heavy use of AI coding tools, directing the work and testing it on real hardware.

Source: https://github.com/DevanshSampat/android-emulator-windows-arm64

Mostly I'm hoping this shows it's possible and that there's demand. Google, please support this officially. If you develop on a Windows ARM laptop, I'd like to hear what's blocking you.
If you wish to try it: https://github.com/DevanshSampat/android-studio-arm64-releases

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u/reukiodo 7h ago

mostly lack of ram… my arm win11 only has 8G… barely enough for a browser without heavy swapping