How to safely remove/uninstall Android Virtual Device .img files added by Visual Studio Emulator for Android

Question

_{Thursday, July 13, 2017 11:58 AM | 1 vote}

When the Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 product is installed and the Cross-Platform Mobile Development workload is selected, it adds the Visual Studio Emulator for Android component, including a set of Android Virtual Devices (avd) folders (e.g. c:\Users\username\android\avd\VisualStudio_android-23_arm_phone.avd), containing some pretty large .img files. However, upon removing/uninstalling the "Visual Studio Emulator for Android" component from the product, it does not remove the AVDs and .img files. These are still left intact and consuming over 10GB of disk-space. So, question is, how does one safely remove/uninstall the Android Virtual Device .img files without breaking something. Is directly deleting them from the file-system, a safe option? Unfortunately, it does not appear on the Windows Control Panel's 'Add/Remove Programs' list. Thankful for any directions/possible suggestions.

Obinna

All replies (2)

_{Friday, July 14, 2017 6:02 AM | 2 votes}

Hi ObinnaKalu,

Thank you for posting in MSDN forum.

In VS, there is an Android Emulator Manager as below:

Please open the Manger, then choose the corresponding one and delete it:

Best Regards,

MSDN Community Support
Please remember to click "Mark as Answer" the responses that resolved your issue, and to click "Unmark as Answer" if not. This can be beneficial to other community members reading this thread. If you have any compliments or complaints to MSDN Support, feel free to contact [email protected].

_{Tuesday, July 3, 2018 11:49 AM}

This command/menu option is not available, yet all these emulator files are littering my machine.

If you do not have TACO or Xamarin stuff installed as part of visual studio, you probably do not need these files and can just delete them.