Android SDK folder taking a lot of disk space Do we need to keep all of the System Images

Question

There are a lot of system images piling up on my disk in the android sdk folder  i hardly use the emulator  May be once in 6 months  Most of my development is directly on device  What i wanted to check was  will removing the system images  at least for the old APIS i e   lt  22  impact the development   Also  the google apis folder seen below  Should i keep it for all versions or just the one in the latest suffice     Screenshot above is from WinDirStat tool  -  https   windirstat net

User · Answer

System images are pre-installed Android operating systems, and are only used by emulators. If you use your real Android device for debugging, you no longer need them, so you can remove them all.

The cleanest way to remove them is using SDK Manager. Open up SDK Manager and uncheck those system images and then apply.

Also feel free to remove other components (e.g. old SDK levels) that are of no use.

User · Answer

You do not need to keep the system images unless you want to use the emulator on your desktop  Along with it you can remove other unwanted stuff to clear disk space   Adding as an answer to my own question as I ve had to narrate this to people in my team more than a few times  Hence this answer as a reference to share with other curious ones   In the last few weeks there were several colleagues who asked me how to safely get rid of the unwanted stuff to release disk space  most of them were beginners   I redirected them to this question but they came back to me for steps  So for android beginners here is a step by step guide to safely remove unwanted stuff   Note   Do not blindly delete everything directly from disk that you  think  is not required occupying  I did that once and had to re-download  Make sure you have a list of all active projects with the kind of emulators  if any  and API Levels and Build tools required for those to continue working compiling properly       First  be sure you are not going to use emulators and will always do   you development on a physical device  In case you are going to need   emulators  note down the API Levels and type of emulators you ll need    Do not remove those  For the rest follow the below steps    Steps to safely clear up unwanted stuff from Android SDK folder on the disk        Open the Stand Alone Android SDK Manager    To open do one of the following        Click the SDK Manager button on toolbar in android studio or eclipse In Android Studio  go to settings and search  Android SDK   Click Android SDK -   Open Standalone SDK Manager  In Eclipse  open the  Window  menu and select  Android SDK Manager  Navigate to the location of the android-sdk directory on your computer and run  SDK Manager exe             Uncheck all items ending with  System Image   Each API Level will have more than a few  In case you need some and have figured the list already leave them checked to avoid losing them and having to re-download                Optional  may help save a marginally more amount of disk space   To   free up some more space  you can also entirely uncheck unrequired API levels     Be careful again to avoid re-downloading something you are actually   using in other projects                In the end make sure you have at least the following  check image below  for the remaining   API levels to be able to seamlessly work with your physical device       In the end the clean android sdk installed components should look something like this in the SDK manager

User · Answer

There is the way to safely removed system-image  Go in SDK Manager in toolbar        Go in Android SDK      In tab SDK Platforms  uncheck which platform you want unistall      Click ok and confirm deletion

User · Answer

I recommend two steps to address the bloated SDK problem     First  I removed all but two versions of Android    The current version  e g  6 0 Marshmallow as of this writing  This version is to test and develop to the latest and greatest that the current Nexus handsets are running plus a couple of other brands  An older version  e g  4 04 Ice Cream Sandwich  This is to provide compatibility for the vast majority of handsets   You lose some functionality of the newer versions  but you gain a lowest common denominator of compatibility    Second  I removed the emulators  and kept only the above two   I told it not to store the complete system state to disk  which it does indeed warn you will take up a lot of space  though it does make start-up faster   Just start up the emulator before you go make your coffee in the morning     If that s too much space  remove the emulators completely   Pick up a couple of older handsets off Ebay that will provide you with all the test platforms you need   They don t even have to be completely functional -- many apps don t need a SIM and cellular connectivity  for example   My Android environment was taking up 32 gigs on my 128-gig Macbook Air   Couldn t keep doing this   Some day they ll make terabyte Macbook Airs but until then  got to slim down

User · Answer

By deleting all emulator  sometime memory will not be reduce to our expectation  So open below mention path in you c drive  C  Users Username  android avd  In this avd folder  you can able to see all the avd s which you created earlier  So you need to delete all avd s that will remove all the unused spaces grab by your emulator s  Than create the fresh emulator for you works

User · Answer

In this folder there are all emulator images  If you don t use emulator then you can delete this folder

User · Answer

I had 20 8 GB in the C  Users ggo AppData Local Android Sdk system-images folder  6 android images   - android-10  - android-15  - android-21  - android-23  - android-25  - android-26     I have compressed the C  Users ggo AppData Local Android Sdk system-images folder   Now it takes only 4 65 GB     I did not encountered any problem up to now     Compression seems to vary from 2 3 to 6  sometimes much more

User · Answer

This is the minimal stuff I keep for day to day Android development  including production code   Latest versions from API 25 to API 27  Nougat to Android P  included only  and you can work great with it    To minimize even more  just keep any one of the below versions as same and keep a lower versions i e  API 16 with same files downloaded as below

User · Answer

In addition to the other answers  the following directory contains deletable system images on a Mac for Android Studio 2 3 3  I was able to delete the android-16 and android-17 directories without any problem because I didn t have any emulators which used them   I kept the android-24 which was in use      pwd  Users gareth Library Android sdk system-images    du -h 2 5G      android-16 default x86 2 5G      android-16 default 2 5G      android-16 google apis x86 2 5G      android-16 google apis 5 1G      android-16 2 5G      android-17 default x86 2 5G      android-17 default 2 5G      android-17 3 0G      android-24 default x86 64 3 0G      android-24 default 3 0G      android-24  11G

[android] Android SDK folder taking a lot of disk space. Do we need to keep all of the System Images?

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