Do we need to manually start the Android emulator for Appium?

Question

I'm new to appium and I'm running the calculator example test using the following code:

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
capabilities.setCapability("deviceName","AndroidTestDevice");
capabilities.setCapability("platformName","Android");    
capabilities.setCapability("appPackage", "com.android.calculator2");       
capabilities.setCapability("appActivity","com.android.calculator2.Calculator");
driver = new RemoteWebDriver(new URL("http://0.0.0.0:4723/wd/hub"), capabilities);

Appium is running as you can see in the following screenshot:

If the emulator is not running, I get the error related to no devices found. My question is:

Do I need to manually start the emulator every time I need to execute a test? or Does appium will start the android emulator when the test is executed?

Answer 1

In your settings enable "Launch AVD" and enter the name of the Android Virtual Device you created. This will start the emulator (if it's not already started) whenever you start a test.

Update:

You need to set the AVD capability. Simply add this line to your code capabilities.setCapability("avd","AndroidTestDevice");