Skip to content

Let tools that drive emulators over gRPC find Simlock's emulators #1042

Closed as not planned

Description

@Nabil372

The problem

Tools that show and drive an Android emulator through its gRPC endpoint (argent, Android Studio's Running Devices) find an emulator through the discovery file it writes under avd/running/. Simlock starts its emulators without a gRPC port, so no discovery file exists. Such a tool sees a leased emulator on Simlock's adb server but cannot take a screenshot or send input; argent fails with "emulator not found among running emulators ... check avd/running/*.ini". adb-only control still works.

Who runs into this

Coding agents on one Mac that lease emulators from Simlock and drive them with argent for app QA. Each agent gets an emulator, but none of them can see its screen or tap it through argent, so Android QA falls back to raw adb.

What you would like to happen

An operator-only setting that starts Simlock's emulators with their gRPC endpoint on, so the emulator writes its discovery file. Off by default, so nothing changes for anyone who doesn't set it.

Anything else

We carry a local patch today and opened #1041 with one way to do it (android.emulator.grpc, port = console port + 3000, with a token). With the setting on, Android Studio also lists Simlock's emulators, which ADR 0001 otherwise keeps out of its sight; that is the operator's choice.

Activity

  1. robrechtme commented on Oct 29, 2026

    @robrechtme

    Related to #639 🙂

  2. Nabil372 commented on Oct 29, 2026

    @Nabil372
    Author

    Thanks @robrechtme, closing as a duplicate of #639. #1041 now implements the decision there.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions