Device tooling for Android inside VS Code, inspired by the tools found in Android Studio: Running Devices, Device Manager and Logcat, without leaving your editor. Works with Flutter, Kotlin, React Native, or any project that targets Android.
Not affiliated with Google or JetBrains. "Android" is a trademark of Google LLC.
Features
Running Devices
- Live screen of Android emulators and physical devices, with touch, scroll, keyboard, back/home/overview, power, volume and rotation controls.
- Emulators are streamed through the emulator gRPC API (same approach as Android Studio). Physical devices use scrcpy. A screenshot loop is the last resort.
- Device frame (skin) around the screen when the AVD has one, toggled from the ⋮ menu.
- Screenshot (with Rectangular, Display Shape or Show Device Frame when the AVD has a skin) and screen recording.
- Extended Controls (location, battery, cellular…) opened natively when the emulator supports it.
+ button to start a virtual device or pair a device over Wi-Fi.
Device Manager
- Table of your AVDs and connected devices (name, API, type).
- Create, edit, start, cold boot, stop, wipe data and delete AVDs.
- Start/stop progress indicators, like Android Studio.
Logcat
- Studio-like filter language:
tag:, package:, process:, message:, line:, level:, age:, is:crash, is:stacktrace, with = (exact) and ~ (regex) variants, - negation, parentheses, &/|.
- Autocompletion of keys and values (tags and packages seen in the logs), filter history with match counts, favorites, match case.
- Standard and compact formats, soft-wrap, pause, restart, stack trace navigation, screenshot and recording buttons.
Requirements
- VS Code 1.85 or later.
- The Android SDK (platform-tools, emulator, and cmdline-tools for creating AVDs). It is found through the
android.sdkPath setting, ANDROID_HOME, ANDROID_SDK_ROOT, or the default install location.
- No other install is needed: scrcpy's server is bundled.
- Tested on macOS (Apple Silicon). Linux and Windows are expected to work but are less tested.
Settings
| Setting |
Default |
Description |
android.sdkPath |
"" |
Android SDK path. |
android.embeddedEmulator |
true |
Launch emulators without their own window (-qt-hide-window -grpc <port>) and show them in Running Devices. |
android.fixSoftwareRendering |
true |
Before launching an AVD with hw.gpu.enabled=no (the avdmanager default, very slow), switch it to host GPU by editing its config.ini. |
android.mirrorIntervalMs |
150 |
Delay between captures in screenshot fallback mode. |
android.logcat.maxEntries |
50000 |
Logcat entries kept in memory. |
What the extension changes on your machine
- Pushes
scrcpy-server to /data/local/tmp on devices mirrored with scrcpy.
- Launches emulators with
-grpc <free port>. The gRPC endpoint is local only.
- May edit
~/.android/avd/<name>.avd/config.ini (GPU settings, see above). Disable with android.fixSoftwareRendering.
- Reads emulator state from the SDK's
avd/running/*.ini files (gRPC port and token, which are required to attach to emulators started by Android Studio).
- No telemetry. No network access other than to your local emulators and
adb.
Troubleshooting
- Nothing in Device Manager: set
android.sdkPath, then run Device Tools: Refresh.
- Emulator feels slow: make sure
android.fixSoftwareRendering is on, or set hw.gpu.mode=auto in the AVD.
- Extended Controls open in a VS Code panel instead of the native window: the emulator must be started by this extension (
-qt-hide-window) or support the UI controller service.
- Physical device shows no live video: authorize USB debugging on the device; otherwise the screenshot fallback is used.
Credits
Icons come from Android Studio and the IntelliJ Platform (Apache-2.0); see NOTICE and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. Screen mirroring of physical devices uses scrcpy.
License
MIT
| |
