How to Run the Expo React Native app on the emulator
In this article, we are going to talk about how to run the Expo React Native app on the emulator, we need to
- install Android Studio
- run the emulator through web
- run the emulator through terminal
Related Course
Complete React Native articles:
- How to build a React Native app with Expo
- How to Run the Expo React Native app on the emulator
- Expo folder and file structure
- Expo React Native View, Text and Style
- Expo React Native — using React Hook useState()
- How to Use TextInput Component to Change State in React Native?
- How to Use Expo React Native List and ScrollView
- How and why we use Flatlist in Expo React Native
- What is TouchableOpacity in Expo React Native?
Install Android Studio
In order to preview the React Native app on an Android virtual device. Firstof all you’ll need Android studio installed on your computer.
We are going to configure then select a AVD manager stands for Android virtual devices they arebasically Android emulators that look like phones on our computer so we can test things on them.

We created an Android virtual device it’s a Nexus 5x with the API level of 28 and I can just click on this play button thing to start that Android emulator or that virtual device.

If this is the first time doing this, you are not going to see that.
Instead you have to create a new virtual device you will click on this.

You can select your phone or device, API level and click “Finish”.



If you already created one, we can just press on the play button to launch this device . It just going to take a few seconds then

Run the dummy app at emulator from the web
If I want to preview the project on this virtual device now, I can just go over here and click “run on Android device / emulator” at the menu, which is at the left hand side of the web.

If this is the first time you do this it is going to ask you to install Expo or rather it’s going to do it for you installing Expo on the device
If you already installed and get the following message in the terminal, you can upgrade the Expo client.


Then we should see the download screen where it is downloading the JavaScript bundle or building it and then when this gets to 100%.
We should see the dummy app on this device

Run the dummy app at emulator from the terminal

Actually there is another way to run the app from the terminal, we can just simply press “a”. It will then run the app to the Android emulator.
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