Emulator not able to run on MacOs. Emulator claims that OS is out of date

Question

After installing the latest update today I started to get this error:

Emulator: Sorry, "qemu-system-x86_64" can not be run on this version of macOS. Qt requires macOS 10.12.0 or later, you have macOS 10.10.5.

I'm trying to emulate it on a Noxia 4. I've deleted the virtual device, and recreated it a couple times to no avail. This is consistent with all my projects. I haven't found an answer to this issue anywhere, and I don't know if it is actually out of date, or if it is just saying that. I was wondering if anyone had this issue in the past.

My reported MacOS version is correct. I'm on 10.10.5 Yosemite.

Answer 1

I've encountered the same error a while back. My macOs was not so drastically outdated though. If you have installed the newest emulators - they are dependent on version of Qt different that is installed in your system(or maybe there is no Qt installed at all - I am not an expert in mac infrastructure).

To fix this issue you may try several approaches.

• Try to install the old version of emulator you want to use - the one that is compliant with your current macOs version. Android Studio before 3.5 can work with ancient emulators. I haven't tried with 3.5 and up though.

• Try to install needed version of Qt in your system. The current version is 5.12.

• Update macOs to the newest one and use the newest emulator.

I haven't tried first two, but the third one fixed my issue.

Answer 2

The error message is pretty clear about it:

Qt requires macOS 10.12.0 or later, you have macOS 10.10.5.

This would be DMG image, which performs the necessary OS upgrade. Later versions would also work, but this one is the least required to run Qt. The fear-mongering in that deleted answer might not be justified (fear disables logical thinking - that's why fear is not a good adviser). It's just a minor version update, which is something else than installing the next major version on yesterday's hardware. The Inkscape installer claims to support version 10.7 (which is already elder than the current version 10.10.5), so that claim might be a hoax - and even if it's true, building from source should still be possible. If still in doubt, just use the time machine to create a snapshot before applying the OS update (in terms of: better safe than sorry).

Answer 3

I found that I still had an old version of Genymotion (v. 2.5) lying around. I hadn't used it for years as the built-in Android Studio emulators had become much better.

But it looks like Genymotion works! I don't dare upgrading it since IT WORKS now, so I don't know how helpful this answer is to others.

This is a solution for people who need to stick around with older versions of Mac OS (OSX). The rest of the mac users should abandon all their old software and embrace the new operating systems, happy that their workload will be greatly increased. Thank you Apple!