Adding Google Play Store to an Android Emulator device on macOS

adding the Google Play Store to an Android emulator device on macOS by editing PlayStore.enabled and image.sysdir.1 in the avd config.ini.

This is something that turned out to be fairly simple to do and took less than five minutes.

1. Turn off the emulator device

2. The Emulator device settings are in ~/.android/avd/EMULATOR_DEVICE_NAME.avd/config.ini. (You can also find the emulator device’s config folder by clicking options dropdown and selecting Show on Disk)

Set PlayStore.enabled to true and change google_apis in image.sysdir.1 to google_apis_playstore

1PlayStore.enabled=false
2image.sysdir.1=system-images/android-32/google_apis/arm64-v8a/

will become:

1PlayStore.enabled=true
2image.sysdir.1=system-images/android-32/google_apis_playstore/arm64-v8a/

3. Wipe Data and Cold Boot the the emulator device. You should now see Play Store in apps.