Android arm emulator devices give confusing errors and won't start

Question

Am trying to build .Net Maui app on new Surface Laptop with Snapdragon (ARM64) processor and Windows 11 Pro. If I install any arm device via Android Device Manager in VS 2022 (eg Pixel 7 - API 35), when I click "Start" I get an immediate error:

Device error: PANIC: Avd's CPU Architecture 'arm64' is not supported by the QEMU2 emulator on x86_64 host.

Since I'm not trying to run it on an x86_84 host I'm confused! The Snapdragon processor is an arm64 device?

Just in case, I tried also installing the x64 version of the Pixel 7 and got a much longer, but basically the same 'processor mismatch' error.

Is there a setting somewhere which I've missed?

Thanks for any suggestions

Answer 1

the real issue is that Android has not released simulators for Windows arm, only for Mac arm. You can use the windows subsystem for android (WSA), but it goes out of support in March. You probably should just use a real android device.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/

note: the error is because the simulator is an x86_64 program running under your laptop's x86_64 emulation. the simulator program is the x86_64 host in the error message.