Android Studio is completely unintuitive, and the emulator does not work on my machine at all. The first article I came across was from Mark Dappollone on Medium, but it was published back in 2017 and didn't address my main concern: installing Android Studio just to use its emulator is a massive waste of time and hard drive space. Instead of buying a newer phone for my needs, I started looking towards emulators. Recently, I came across a problem: my trusty rooted Android 4 phone couldn't install an app whose API I wanted to reverse engineer, because the app was targeting Android versions 7 and above.
