Why is my Android Studio emulator screen only visible in the task bar

Question

I am trying to run my Android Studio applications using my emulator. But when i try to run it emulator only shows up like this: Emulator stuck in taskbar - Windows 10 I have created multiple Virtual devices though..and all of these have same issue. Sadly, I have no control over my emulator except if i hover over it then only the screen for emulator is displayed but the view is minimized and as soon as I move my mouse away or even if i double click the screen nothing happens. By the way i'm using windows 10 and Android Studio 3.6.3. My problem is similar to Android Studio emulator gets stuck minimised in task bar. But this question has not been helpful to me in fixing my problem.

Answer 1

Okay, took me hours, but I figured it out. Hopefully it can help you or others that stumbled upon here. So, this is happening because for some reason the emulator is being minimised, that's why it's only showing in the taskbar. If you're on windows 11, open up the task manager and you'll see a program running called qemu-system-x86_64.exe, A.K.A Qemu, which is a open source virtual machine that I think the Android emulator that google built is based on. Now, in the task manager, click on the arrow on the left of the qemu-system-x86_64.exe, you'll see the "Android-Emulator-". Right click on that and choose maximize. Hopefully this works and would appreciate it if someone tells me if it works for them. I'm not sure if it will for windows 10, but if it doesn't try upgrading to windows 11 to do it. It happened to me with it as well.

Answer 2

Go to "virtual device" (C:\Users\{yourName}\.android\avd\Pixel_8_Pro_API_35.avd) folder which you created via Android Studio, and find emulator-user.ini file.

Change these values:

window.x = 100
window.y = 20 

You will probably find those values negative when you open the file, and that makes the emulator open on the left side of the screen. By setting positive x-y coordinates, you will see the emulator.