Install Android Market on Honeycomb emulator

Feb 23, 2011
by Ivan

Wanting to try out the new Android Market UI I decided to try a couple of hacks in order to install it on my emulator (which I'm pretty sure you heard is _really_ slow).

1. Install the SDK and create an Android 3.0 ADB, like you normally would. We are going to assume you named the AVD: hcomb30

2. Copy system.img to your AVD folder:

cp /Developer/android-sdk-mac_x86/platforms/android-11/images/system.img ~/.android/avd/hcomb30.avd/

3. Start the emulator with a bigger partition by doing:

emulator -avd hcomb30 -partition-size 200

4. Download GoogleServicesFramework.apk and Vending.apk

5. Now that you have your emulator running with a bigger partition size, run:

adb shell

6. Run:

mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock0 /system

Assuming that is the /system partition, or run mount and look for the correct location

7. Install the APKs you downloaded and remove the SdkSetup.apk so it doesn't revert the process after we reboot.

adb push GoogleServicesFramework.apk /system/app
adb push Vending.apk /system/app
rm /system/app/SdkSetup.apk

In my case I wasn't able to Sign in with Google services after installing it so I reopened the emulator.

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