After the discussion about the restriction concerning downloading and installation of paid applications on developer devices we at least want to simulate installation of free applications on our emulator over the web.

This is the short tutorial how to accomplish that.

The first thing we needed was an application to install so we took the one we created in our first tutorial: HelloAndroid.
We uploaded it on our web space, started the emulator and typed the URL of the apk in the browser. Android told us instantly that we need to install a SD card. Ok, never done that so far, so we looked and found a page about the emulator setup.
We started creating a SD card image with the command line (could take some time…)

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mksdcard 2048M sdcard.iso

Then we started the emulator with the parameter for the SD card image:

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emulator -sdcard sdcard.iso

If you store your SD card image not in the same directory as the emulator start script, you need to add the path to the image like that:

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emulator -sdcard /path/to/androidsdk/tools/sdcard.iso

Now we checked if the emulator has found the SD card. Done that with Menu -> Settings -> SD card & phone storage and read: 2040 MB total space on SD card was found.

After this setup we could easily download our apk-file from the webspace with the android browser, install it and run it.

PS: A warning occurred as we tried it a second time but the warning was just to remind us this application was already installed and if we am sure to replace the existing with the new one.

*Note : The instructions apply to the pre-1.5 SDKs only !!