Live Device
Studio's Live Device pane doubles as Android onboarding — install the SDK, boot an emulator, and watch it live, all from one pane with zero terminal commands.
Studio's Live Device pane watches an agent-driven Android emulator the same way Live Browser watches Chromium — and on a machine with no Android tooling at all, it's also how you get one.
- · Platform tools (adb)
- · Android emulator
- · System image — Android 14, Google APIs
- · SDK licenses
- · Virtual device
A hand-recreated slice of the real pane — switch between No SDK, Installing, Ready to boot, and Watching above to see all three onboarding states plus the live, screen-mirrored device.
From bare machine to booted device
The preview above walks through exactly this flow — its No SDK, Installing, and Ready to boot tabs are the three states this section describes, checklist and Cancel button included.
The pane probes your host (via testrelic device doctor --json, which answers even without
an SDK) and shows one of three states:
- No SDK — offers Install Android tooling (~2 GB), which runs
testrelic device setup --jsonas a child process and streams its NDJSON events into a step checklist (platform tools → emulator → system image → licenses → virtual device) behind a single overall progress bar. - SDK, no AVD — the same install flow, scoped to just the missing pieces; setup always plans only the gaps, so re-running it after a partial install costs nothing already fetched.
- Ready — offers Boot device & serve WebDriver, which starts the
TestRelic_DeviceAVD and a local WebDriver server, then switches the pane to live, screen-mirrored frames.
Cancelling mid-install kills the setup process; closing Studio reaps it rather than leaving an orphaned download running.
Same tooling either way
Everything the pane does is also a CLI command — testrelic device setup and testrelic device up --serve — so a scripted or headless setup behaves identically to the button. See
Device setup.
Why it needs neither Java nor Android Studio
sdkmanager/avdmanager are Java programs, so a conventional Android setup starts with
"install a JDK." Studio's provisioning engine skips that: packages come straight from
dl.google.com's public repository listing, the SDK license is accepted by writing the same
hash files sdkmanager writes — only once you've consented — and the AVD is generated from
a template captured off a real avdmanager, hardened with 4 GB RAM, hw.wifi=no, and 4 CPU
cores from what actually broke under load.
- ○Install a JDK — sdkmanager and avdmanager are Java programs
- ○Install Android Studio, just to get its bundled command-line tools
- ○Open SDK Manager and download the platform + system image by hand
- ○Click through the SDK license dialog yourself
- ○Launch AVD Manager and hand-tune RAM, CPU, and network settings
- ✓No JDK, no Android Studio — nothing to install first
- ✓Packages pulled straight from dl.google.com’s public repo listing
- ✓License accepted by writing the same hash files sdkmanager writes — once you consent
- ✓AVD generated from a template captured off a real avdmanager
- ✓Hardened automatically: 4 GB RAM, hw.wifi=no, 4 cores — from what broke under load
Next steps
Live Browser
Studio launches its own Chromium and screencasts it live — the agent's Playwright MCP drives that exact browser, so you watch every click and navigation happen in real time.
Evals
Studio's Evals pane reads DeepEval test-run JSON straight out of your repo and renders metric scores, agent conversations, and tool calls — no upload required.