argent-android-emulator-setup - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: argent-android-emulator-setup description: Set up and connect to an Android emulator using argent MCP tools. Use when starting a new session on Android, booting an emulator, getting a device serial, or before any UI interaction task.

1. Prerequisites

Android SDK Platform Tools on PATH — provides adb.
Android Emulator on PATH — needed to boot AVDs. If you will only use an already-running emulator or a physical device, adb alone is sufficient.
An AVD created via Android Studio or avdmanager create avd.

Verify with adb version and emulator -list-avds.

2. Setup

Find a ready device — call list-devices. Filter for entries with platform: "android". Ready devices (state: "device") come first. Pick the first serial (e.g. emulator-5554) unless the user specified one.
Boot if needed — if nothing Android is ready, call boot-device with avdName: <name> from the same call's avds list. The tool transparently picks hot vs cold boot: it probes the AVD's default_boot snapshot, restores it under a tight deadline when usable, and falls back to a full cold boot otherwise. Hot path is typically ~30s; cold path takes 2–10 min. On any stage failure the tool kills the emulator process it started so your next call starts from a clean state.
Metro (for React Native) — once a device is up, run adb -s <serial> reverse tcp:8081 tcp:8081 so the device can reach Metro on your host. Repeat if the device restarts. See the argent-metro-debugger skill.

3. Using the device

Pass the Android serial as udid to the unified interaction tools — gesture-tap, gesture-swipe, describe, screenshot, launch-app, keyboard, etc. Dispatch is automatic based on the id shape. See argent-device-interact for platform-neutral interaction tooling and the Android-specific gotchas section at the bottom of that skill.

4. Notes

Serials are the adb device id. iOS UDIDs and Android serials are not interchangeable, but you do NOT need to tell the tools which platform — dispatch is automatic.
describe on Android returns a shallower tree than iOS (no accessibility-service equivalent), but covers most tap-target discovery.
reinstall-app on Android always installs with -g so first-launch runtime permissions are pre-granted.
To stop the emulator, run adb -s <serial> emu kill from a shell (clean shutdown). Never pkill -9/kill -9 qemu — a hard kill leaves the userdata image dirty, after which cold boots can hang for many minutes doing recovery (runaway writes, boot_completed never flips). If an image gets into that state, boot once with -wipe-data to reset it.