12 February 2015, 03:30

A while ago I described how to get Android Jelly Bean fully emulated on a Mac.

Recently I wanted to try out the latest Android release – 5.0 Lollipop – but the instructions no longer work, perhaps because of a bug or incompatibility in Genymotion, which is used for the emulation. Notably, the usual drag and drop method of flashing files doesn’t work.

After a bit of hacking and researching, I found a way to get it all working, just about – that’s the full Android Lollypop, complete with the proprietary Google Play services such as the Google Play Store. You can run apps and play most games. It’s pretty cool.

The instructions below assume you’ve not got any of the required software installed (which is all either free for personal use, or open source). You can skip some of the steps if you have.