Android emulator not loading my app

I haven't used Android in a little while now, in particular with my new laptop, and the first time I tried running an Android app from inside Eclipse, the Android emulator wouldn't finish starting properly and run my app.

I remember I used to look under the “all apps” icon, and could sometimes find my app was actually loaded, but in this case, it wasn't loaded at all.

After loading everything back into my own memory, I remember that I used to have to kill the Android adb tool some times to get things to work, like this:

adb kill-server

The adb command is now located in the platform-tools directory under your Android SDK installation, so I found it there, then followed these steps:

1. Leave Eclipse running.
2. Open a Terminal window, and run that "adb kill-server" command.
3. Run my Android app through Eclipse again.

For me, this solved my 'Android emulator won't load my app' problem.

Android adb command help

It always helps to know more about a problem, and about the tools you're using, so I recommend spending a few moments looking through the following adb command line options.

Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.29

 -d                            - directs command to the only connected USB device
                                 returns an error if more than one USB device is present.
 -e                            - directs command to the only running emulator.
                                 returns an error if more than one emulator is running.
 -s <serial number>            - directs command to the USB device or emulator with
                                 the given serial number. Overrides ANDROID_SERIAL
                                 environment variable.
 -p <product name or path>     - simple product name like 'sooner', or
                                 a relative/absolute path to a product
                                 out directory like 'out/target/product/sooner'.
                                 If -p is not specified, the ANDROID_PRODUCT_OUT
                                 environment variable is used, which must
                                 be an absolute path.
 devices                       - list all connected devices
 connect <host>[:<port>]       - connect to a device via TCP/IP
                                 Port 5555 is used by default if no port number is specified.
 disconnect [<host>[:<port>]]  - disconnect from a TCP/IP device.
                                 Port 5555 is used by default if no port number is specified.
                                 Using this command with no additional arguments
                                 will disconnect from all connected TCP/IP devices.

device commands:
  adb push <local> <remote>    - copy file/dir to device
  adb pull <remote> [<local>]  - copy file/dir from device
  adb sync [ <directory> ]     - copy host->device only if changed
                                 (-l means list but don't copy)
                                 (see 'adb help all')
  adb shell                    - run remote shell interactively
  adb shell <command>          - run remote shell command
  adb emu <command>            - run emulator console command
  adb logcat [ <filter-spec> ] - View device log
  adb forward <local> <remote> - forward socket connections
                                 forward specs are one of: 
                                   tcp:<port>
                                   localabstract:<unix domain socket name>
                                   localreserved:<unix domain socket name>
                                   localfilesystem:<unix domain socket name>
                                   dev:<character device name>
                                   jdwp:<process pid> (remote only)
  adb jdwp                     - list PIDs of processes hosting a JDWP transport
  adb install [-l] [-r] [-s] <file> - push this package file to the device and install it
                                 ('-l' means forward-lock the app)
                                 ('-r' means reinstall the app, keeping its data)
                                 ('-s' means install on SD card instead of internal storage)
  adb uninstall [-k] <package> - remove this app package from the device
                                 ('-k' means keep the data and cache directories)
  adb bugreport                - return all information from the device
                                 that should be included in a bug report.

  adb backup [-f <file>] [-apk|-noapk] [-shared|-noshared] [-all] [-system|-nosystem] [<packages...>]
                               - write an archive of the device's data to <file>.
                                 If no -f option is supplied then the data is written
                                 to "backup.ab" in the current directory.
                                 (-apk|-noapk enable/disable backup of the .apks themselves
                                    in the archive; the default is noapk.)
                                 (-shared|-noshared enable/disable backup of the device's
                                    shared storage / SD card contents; the default is noshared.)
                                 (-all means to back up all installed applications)
                                 (-system|-nosystem toggles whether -all automatically includes
                                    system applications; the default is to include system apps)
                                 (<packages...> is the list of applications to be backed up.  If
                                    the -all or -shared flags are passed, then the package
                                    list is optional.  Applications explicitly given on the
                                    command line will be included even if -nosystem would
                                    ordinarily cause them to be omitted.)

  adb restore <file>           - restore device contents from the <file> backup archive

  adb help                     - show this help message
  adb version                  - show version num

scripting:
  adb wait-for-device          - block until device is online
  adb start-server             - ensure that there is a server running
  adb kill-server              - kill the server if it is running
  adb get-state                - prints: offline | bootloader | device
  adb get-serialno             - prints: <serial-number>
  adb status-window            - continuously print device status for a specified device
  adb remount                  - remounts the /system partition on the device read-write
  adb reboot [bootloader|recovery] - reboots the device, optionally into the bootloader or recovery program
  adb reboot-bootloader        - reboots the device into the bootloader
  adb root                     - restarts the adbd daemon with root permissions
  adb usb                      - restarts the adbd daemon listening on USB
  adb tcpip <port>             - restarts the adbd daemon listening on TCP on the specified port
networking:
  adb ppp <tty> [parameters]   - Run PPP over USB.
 Note: you should not automatically start a PPP connection.
 <tty> refers to the tty for PPP stream. Eg. dev:/dev/omap_csmi_tty1
 [parameters] - Eg. defaultroute debug dump local notty usepeerdns

adb sync notes: adb sync [ <directory> ]
  <localdir> can be interpreted in several ways:

  - If <directory> is not specified, both /system and /data partitions will be updated.

  - If it is "system" or "data", only the corresponding partition
    is updated.

environmental variables:
  ADB_TRACE                    - Print debug information. A comma separated list of the following values
                                 1 or all, adb, sockets, packets, rwx, usb, sync, sysdeps, transport, jdwp
  ANDROID_SERIAL               - The serial number to connect to. -s takes priority over this if given.
  ANDROID_LOG_TAGS             - When used with the logcat option, only these debug tags are printed.

As you can see from those options, it may also be possible to reboot the adb server instead of killing it, and I'll try that the next time I run into this problem.

Finally, as you can see from the following 'ps' command, the Android adb server runs as a separate process on your system:

$ ps auxwww | grep adb
al   8539  0.0  0.0   87116   1168 s003  S  10:41AM   0:00.11 adb fork-server server

That's the process I just killed/restarted to get my app to load.