2 min readstudiocliandroidmobileannouncement

One-click Android onboarding: from bare machine to booted emulator

TestRelic Team

Setting up Android testing infrastructure has always meant a detour before you could write a single test: install a JDK, install Android Studio, click through its setup wizard, accept a license dialog, wait for a multi-gigabyte download, and only then create a virtual device. Today's release skips all of it — testrelic device setup and a matching flow in TestRelic Studio take a bare machine straight to a booted, WebDriver-ready Android emulator.

Bare machine to booted device, one button

Studio's Live Device pane now doubles as the onboarding surface. On a machine with no Android SDK at all, it offers a single Install Android tooling (~2 GB) button. Click it, and the pane streams a live step checklist — platform tools, the emulator, a system image, SDK licenses, and a virtual device — behind one progress bar, fed by the CLI's own event stream. When it finishes, Boot device & serve WebDriver starts the emulator and streams its screen live in the same pane, ready for Appium or Maestro to drive.

The same flow is two commands for scripts and CI:

testrelic device setup --yes
testrelic device up --serve

See it in action on the Live Device page.

No JDK, no Android Studio required

sdkmanager and avdmanager are Java programs, so a conventional Android setup starts with "install a JDK." TestRelic's provisioning engine doesn't need one: packages come straight from dl.google.com's public repository listing, the SDK license is accepted only after you explicitly consent, and the virtual device it creates is tuned from real usage — 4 GB RAM (a 2 GB guest ANR-storms under load), Wi-Fi disabled (an AVD's virtual Wi-Fi otherwise routes traffic around any network capture), and four CPU cores.

device setup only ever plans the gaps: on a partial install it fills in what's missing, and re-running it after a successful setup does nothing. Downloads are cached under ~/.testrelic/cache/android, so an interrupted run or a retry from Studio never re-pays the ~1.5 GB fetch.

Get started

Update the CLI and run testrelic device setup, or open testrelic studio and follow the Live Device pane. Full flag reference and what each step installs: Device setup.

FAQ: Does this replace an existing Android Studio install?

No — if you already have an SDK, device setup detects it and only fills in whatever's missing (a system image, an AVD, licenses). It never removes or reconfigures an existing install.

FAQ: Can I run this in CI?

Yes. Pass --yes to consent non-interactively, and --json to get one NDJSON progress event per line instead of human-readable output.