Will Android Studio work on Mac with an ARM processor?

Question

Will Android Studio work on Apple with arm chips ARM (the new Mac devices)?

It is regularly crashing on my machine. Without proper measurement also the compile process seems to be slower, but that might be subjective. — rekire, Feb 02 '21 at 12:21

hannes ach · Answer 1 · 2021-06-02T07:42:01.113

Good news !

Edit on May 2021

Apple Silicon Support

There is an arm64 version available for Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) Canary 15 ... Beta03 You can download it here https://developer.android.com/studio/archive

NDK builds doesn't work

First post

Android Studio 4.1 works, but I'm not able to make Emulator work. Even the ARM image shows me a CPU does not support VT-x

I can confirm, this preview of Emulator works properly https://androidstudio.googleblog.com/2020/12/android-emulator-apple-silicon-preview.html

Since v3 even audio-out works (no audio-in)

Update March 2021

You can simple use one of these and it's working out of the box

I wonder if you can update your answer if you found a solution later — amorenew, Nov 19 '20 at 21:11

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 23 '20 at 13:10

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For most programming, the chip "underneath the hood" doesn't matter. It only matters if you're working very low-level.

To support old and new apps, Apple will use Rosetta 2, integrated emulation software, to enable ARM-based Macs to run Intel code

The IntelliJ issue for ARM support

The pull request for ARM support on IntelliJ

edited Jun 23 '20 at 13:10

amorenew

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answered Jun 23 '20 at 07:25

Ezra

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I don't think you understood the question - that link is to the *current* install for macOS, but Apple just announced a switch from Intel to ARM chips, a totally different processor architecture, *in the future*. It *is* possible some existing macOS programs will not work correctly, or will require work to do so. That said, given it's been accepted, I'm not sure the OP understood their question either. – jonrsharpe Jun 23 '20 at 07:55
Maybe. Android studio is written in Java, Kotlin, and C++, all languages that I would be *shocked* if Apple didn't support on their new computers. Also, Google makes Android Studio (contracts it out) and so they'll almost certainly make it work. Because Android Studio isn't written in assembly compilers may need to change but everything layers of abstraction above them should be fine. – Ezra Jun 23 '20 at 08:00
Sure, I also expect that it will either work or they'll fix it so it does, but my point is that's not what your answer reflects. You just state that it will and offer as proof a link to show that it currently does *on Intel*. – jonrsharpe Jun 23 '20 at 08:03
Fair enough. Edited. – Ezra Jun 23 '20 at 08:05
This is still plain wrong. "for most programming the chip "underneath the hood" doesn't matter". That is false, it is true for interpreted languages such as Python and javascript but most certainly not for C/C++ and any other compiled to machine code programs. – Tarick Welling Jun 23 '20 at 12:39
@TarickWelling Any software will be emulated by Rosetta 2 to allow it to work, An I think it AS works on Chrome book then it supports ARM or it will do it. – amorenew Jun 23 '20 at 12:56
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@amorenew Emulation is possible and it is probably going to work but to state that most programming doesn't have a reality to interface with is is just wrong. The only places where that is true is interpreted languages. As such any blanket statement is providing false information. And even more so in this situation, the underlying chip does matter as it impacts performance and support. – Tarick Welling Jun 23 '20 at 13:53
I'm forced to use x86 emulator and I'm not surprised to have here a performance bottleneck here – hannes ach Aug 09 '20 at 19:09
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Android studio works on Mac M1 arm under rosetta 2. However, if you are using android studio, i presume you would like to also run the android emulator. This definitely does NOT work on rosetta 2 as of 11/24/2020. – jsonxr Nov 25 '20 at 02:33

cliveleehere · Answer 3 · 2020-07-03T16:49:39.840

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Intellij (and Google to a lesser extent) has a financial interest in making sure that it does work. Emulation might be slow, but I would be shocked if the IDEs and other tools aren't recompiled to work pretty soon after the release. Edit: Their IDEs already work on ARM-based Chromebooks, which hopefully means there's little work in making it work for ARM Macs

And on the bright side, emulators will probably be faster?

edited Jul 03 '20 at 16:49

answered Jul 03 '20 at 14:16

cliveleehere

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What about build time? – Mohsin Falak Aug 31 '20 at 03:57
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@MohsinFalak I have a MacBook Pro on M1 with 16 GB of RAM and a Desktop with i7-7700K & 32 GB DDR4 + really fast SSD (970 evo plus). The same project builds in 54 sec on macbook and 50 sec on the desktop. – artem Jan 22 '21 at 15:40
@artem Hopefully, the build time will be reduced to half when the IDE goes native. – Mohsin Falak Jan 25 '21 at 21:21
@MohsinFalak why? I already use a native JDK build (Azul) for the building process, Android Studio itself shouldn't make much impact here. – artem Jan 26 '21 at 08:28
@artem Yo, any improvements on IDE responsiveness so far? – Mohsin Falak Apr 26 '21 at 10:42
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@MohsinFalak well I've switched to IDEA, it's already native and supports the latest stable AGP. – artem Apr 27 '21 at 22:04
@artem Right. Any ETA on Android Studio going native? – Mohsin Falak Apr 28 '21 at 23:53

Cristan · Answer 4 · 2021-04-30T08:39:30.907

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Android Studio supports it starting at Arctic Fox 2020.3.1 Canary 15. The related ticket.

edited Apr 30 '21 at 08:39

answered Feb 12 '21 at 17:38

Cristan

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score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 01 '21 at 13:27

Android Studio is Basically InteliJ with the Android plugin enabled by default, so if you're impatient, you can use the M1 build of IntelliJ and enable the Android plugin here.

Currently, this has an issue with the bundled sqlite-jdbc not being compatible with Apple Silicon. To resolve this:

Download sqlite-jdbc 3.34.0 or later at https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/xerial/sqlite-jdbc/
Go to finder > applications > right click on "Intellij Idea" > "show package contents". Go to Contents>lib and replace the old sqlite-jdbc.jar with the latest downloaded sqlite-jdbc.jar file.

Go to https://github.com/google/android-emulator-m1-preview to get an M1 compatible emulator.

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Apr 08 '21 at 10:29

I am using Apple Silicon(M1) Macbook and running Android studio on it. There are 2 things -

Does Android studio work on M1 - YES, it is using Rosette2 to convert android studio binary for ARM. And performance is pretty impressive.
Do i have emulator for M1 - YES, download "Android Emulator M1 Preview2" of emulator from here - https://github.com/741g/android-emulator-m1-preview/releases/tag/0.2

Steps:

Double click the .dmg. It will open folder
Drag and move emulator file to Applications
Right click on emulator file and click open. It will show developer security message. Bypass that from "Security & Privacy" window on Mac.
Right click and Open. And it will launch the emulator.

There are few issues with emulator that will resolve in future releases. You can read more on google page - https://androidstudio.googleblog.com/2020/12/android-emulator-apple-silicon-preview.html

In android studio, you will see this emulator as "Virtual device" in running device drop. Select and run your app.

Will Android Studio work on Mac with an ARM processor?

6 Answers6

Edit on May 2021

First post

Update March 2021