Don’t let those virtual phones stack up. Pick em up and throw them in the Recycle Bin!
Before creating new apps in Android Studio, I wanted to make a new virtual device. All my previous “phones” emulated older versions of Android and I wanted to upgrade. In other words, time for a new phone.

For more on this, watch the video at the bottom of the page.

The Process

I tried to download and install API 30, the Android System Image for running Android R. I constantly got errors due to my hard drive running out of space.

I already had a series of Android images from API 26, 28, and 29. I figured I should make room by getting rid of my “old phones”.

There were two things to get rid of: old system images used for emulating older versions of Android, and old Android Virtual Devices no longer in use. I did some duckduckgo searches and found the storage locations for both:

Android Studio uses both of these resources to emulate a virtual device. By removing the old files, I freed up a lot of GBs of space. This gave me the space needed to install API 30 and Android R.

Keep an eye on these locations as your disk may fill as you work with emulators. If you no longer need a virtual device or Android System image, you know where to look!

For more on this, watch the video below.

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Coding Fanatic