if you are running on an M1 machine, this is the solution. The emulator needs to be updated, because by default it comes in Intel flavor (Darwin) and needs Arm architecture.

1. Head to ~/.briefcase/tools/android_sdk/emulator,
2. download the m1-preview engine from
   https://github.com/google/android-emulator-m1-preview/releases/tag/0.2
   (https://github.com/google/android-emulator-m1-preview/releases/download/0.2/emulator-darwin-aarch64-0.2-engine-only.zip)
3. unzip the zip file
4. cp -r emulator-darwin-aarch64-0.2-engine-only/* .
   (Note: There is a darwin-aarch64-replace.sh file inside the zip file that you can inspect to see what a proper update should look like if it didn’t fail because it tries to delete non-existing files and folders)

if you try to run ./emulator it will fail because the environment variables are not set, so try again: briefcase run android and you will be rewarded with:

Select device:

  1) @Pixel_3a_API_31_arm64-v8a (emulator)
  2) Create a new Android emulator

I am trying to run an android app created by BeeWare and python on MacOS. I run

briefcase run android

and I get the following message

Unable to obtain Android emulator list

What’s going on here? What can I do to find and run the emulator?