James T. Maher's Website

UPDATE 7-15-2018:

As of Android Studio 3.0, this procedure is no longer necessary, as there are both Nexus 5 and Nexus 5X AVD images available with Google Play already installed.

I recently was in a situation where I needed to test a Google Maps API app on a virtual device. When I launched the app, I got an error message about Google Play services needing to be installed in order for the app to be usable. This was strange, I thought, because I had intentionally downloaded the Google Play Services image instead of the plain one. However, it seems that, even if you download the Google Play Services image, you still need to have the Play Store installed in order to use the Maps API. Currently, the only Android emulator with official support for the Play Store is Genymotion, which is a paid product. Instead of this, I decided to try to manually install the Play Store from the OpenGapps "Pico" package (http://opengapps.org/). This package contains a directory called "Core," which contains a large number of .tar.lz archives. To extract these archives, you must use L-Zip (http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html). However, doing this only extracts the .lz part. In order to extract the full archive, you must use another program that is capable of processing .tar files (e.g. 7-zip). The archives that you need to extract are: gmscore-X (where X is the type of image you are using), gsfcore-all, gsflogin-all, and vending-all. Before these archives can be pushed to the emulator, you must start the emulator in writable mode. To do this, open a command prompt to the Android\sdk\tools\ directory and type

emulator -avd YOUR_DEVICE_NAME -writable-system -selinux permissive

.

Once the emulator has been opened, start a new command prompt in the Android\sdk\platform-tools\ directory and type

adb root
adb remount

in order to remount the filesystem in writable mode.

You now will be able to push the previously-extracted APKs:

adb push PrebuiltGmsCore.apk /system/priv-app/PrebuiltGmsCore
adb push GoogleServicesFramework.apk /system/priv-app/GoogleServicesFramework
adb push GoogleLoginService.apk /system/priv-app/GoogleLoginService
adb push Phonesky.apk /system/priv-app/Phonesky

Next, you must make these APKs executable:

adb shell
chmod 777 /system/priv-app/PrebuiltGmsCore
chmod 777 /system/priv-app/GoogleServicesFramework
chmod 777 /system/priv-app/GoogleLoginService
chmod 777 /system/priv-app/Phonesky

Finally, restart the emulator:

adb stop
adb start

If you encounter messages about Google Play Services not behaving properly (e.g. crashing), try deleting the current AVD and making a new one using the image that you just patched.

Now, you should see the Play Store icon on your dashboard.

I would like to thank the people who replied to these StackOverflow posts: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5095234/how-to-get-root-access-on-android-emulator, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34291902/android-studio-emulator-does-not-come-with-play-store-for-api-23 for helping me figure this out.

Comments? Did this not work? Send me a message at jtmaher2(at)gmail(dot)com, or follow me on Twitter.