Android Emulator on an External Drive: What Moves on a Mac, and What Stays

Your internal disk is full, and an external SSD sits nearby with plenty of room. Putting the emulator on it seems obvious. With MACOS EMULATOR, the short answer is no: the engine and the Android device stay in your user folder, and no setting moves them. Here is why, what it changes when the disk fills up, and what you can do instead.

Where the emulator lives on your Mac

Everything the launcher installs goes into your user folder, most of it under Library, then Application Support. Nothing outside that folder, and nothing that needs administrator rights:

• the emulation engine, about 3.5 GB downloaded from Google’s servers at installation;
• the Android system and the device, with your games, which grows as it fills up;
• your configuration, your key mapping, your saved license key and your logs.

On a Mac set up normally, your user folder is on the internal disk, so that is where everything sits. To see it, open the launcher’s Settings (the gear icon), Engine and storage section, Folder line. “Show in Finder” opens the folder, and its path is displayed just below.

No setting to switch disks

The launcher never offers you a choice of another disk, neither at installation nor in Settings. It always looks for its files in the same place. This is deliberate: no elevated rights to ask for, and no conflict with an Android development tool already installed on the Mac.

Putting the app itself on the external drive does not free up the bulk: the engine and the device stay in your user folder, wherever the app is. Keep it in the Mac’s Applications folder, as a single copy, because the Accessibility permission only applies to one copy. The article on the first launch explains why.

Do not move the folder by hand

Copying the emulator’s folder to the external drive, then deleting the original, moves nothing as far as the launcher is concerned: it always looks in the same place and finds nothing there anymore. At the next launch, it sends you back to the installation screen, as on a brand-new Mac. The engine downloads again, your key is asked for again, and the device starts from zero, with your games and, in Full mode, your Google session to redo.

The forum tricks that move the folder and leave a link in its place have never been measured with the launcher, so we do not recommend them. The device writes to its disk continuously while you play, and a drive that gets unplugged in the middle of a match is not a case we have tested.

And never delete this folder to save space. It holds your license key, your configuration and the device with everything in it.

The free space on the external drive does not count

The launcher’s two checks look at the disk your user folder is on, never at another one:

• At installation, it reads the free space of the disk your home folder is on. Below 12 GB, the “Install game engine” button stays grayed out. From 12 to 25 GB, a warning appears. The green check mark comes from 25 GB.
• Before every start, it checks that the device’s disk has enough room to write it all the way, with a margin. Otherwise, it shows “Not enough free disk space to start the device”, with what is needed, what is left and how many gigabytes to free.

An empty external drive therefore changes nothing: it is the internal disk you need to clear. The launcher also only counts truly free space, not the space macOS might free up on its own later. The guide to an emulator’s disk space details what each part weighs.

What you can do instead

1. 1In the launcher, Settings, Engine and storage, Disk line: click “Free up space”. The button removes the Android systems no device uses and leftover downloads, never your device or your games. It can also reply that there is nothing to clean up: most of the space is taken by the device, which it leaves untouched on purpose.
2. 2Move your own files to the external drive: photos, videos, old downloads. They are the ones that belong there, not the emulator.
3. 3Look at what weighs the most in System Settings, then General, then Storage. On macOS 12, go through the Apple menu, then About This Mac, then Storage.
4. 4Throw away the DMG once the app is installed: your customer area keeps the download, “Download the app” button.
5. 5If you no longer play, Uninstall, at the very bottom of Settings, gives all the space back at once, and your key stays valid. The guide to uninstalling an Android emulator details what goes.

On a Mac with several accounts, each macOS session has its own copy of the engine and the device, usually on that same disk. The article on Macs with several users says what that costs in space.

Frequently asked questions