Troubleshooting Android Emulator: “Emulator: Process finished with exit code 1”

Emulator: Process finished with exit code 1

You opened AVD Manager in Android Studio and tried to start an AVD, you got
“Emulator: Process finished with exit code 1”. Following are the steps to debug
this

1. Find out the name of the emulator.
   Click the down arrow 🔽 which is to the right of play arrow ▶️, to find out the name of the AVD. Let’s say the name is “Nexus_5X_API_28_x86”.
2. Try starting the AVD directly from command-line
   It fails with another cryptic error, but that’s at least more actionable

   $(dirname $(which android))/emulator -avd Nexus_5X_API_28_x86
   ...
   PANIC: Broken AVD system path. Check your ANDROID_SDK_ROOT value [/opt/android_sdk]!

   Let’s retry in the verbose mode to see a detailed error

   $(dirname $(which android))/emulator -avd Nexus_5X_API_28_x86 -verbose
   ...
   Not a directory: /opt/android_sdk/system-images/android-28/google_apis/x86/
   

   So, the system image is missing.

3. Install system image

   # List all possible system images.
   $(dirname $(which android))/bin/sdkmanager --list
   # List the images we are interested in.
   $(dirname $(which android))/bin/sdkmanager --list | ack google_apis | ack android-28 | ack x86
   # Install the right one using
   $(dirname $(which android))/bin/sdkmanager --install 'system-images;android-28;google_apis;x86'
   

4. Now try starting the AVD again.

   $(dirname $(which android))/emulator -avd Nexus_5X_API_28_x86 -verbose
   ...
   emulator:Probing program: /opt/android_sdk/tools/emulator64-x86
   emulator:Probing program: /opt/android_sdk/tools/emulator-x86
   PANIC: Missing emulator engine program for 'x86' CPU.
   

   Turns out there is another version of the emulator installed in $(dirname $(dirname $(which android)))/emulator/emulator. And the emulator I was using is a stray one.

   # This works
   $(dirname $(dirname $(which android)))/emulator/emulator -avd Nexus_5X_API_28_x86 -verbose