Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

`devices` reports a phantom Android emulator named after the emulator's crashdata INFO banner

Open Beginner friendly
  • Is something wrong?
#3,716 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Maintainers usually reply within 1 day

@airowe is already working on this.

Since Oct 16, 2026.

  • #3743 by @airowe — open

Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
75/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
android, typescript
Domain
mobile

Research direction

The bug is in how the Android device list is built from emulator -list-avds output, which the report says is split by line with no filtering. Find the code that runs that command and parses its stdout, then reproduce by stubbing the command to print the INFO banner plus no AVD names. Done when the banner no longer appears as a device in devices --json or in the doctor Android count, and a test covers the banner case.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Summary

On a machine with zero AVDs, agent-device devices still reports one Android
emulator, whose id and name are the Android emulator's Crashpad banner:

INFO    | Storing crashdata in: /tmp/<user>/emu-crash-34.2.16.db, detection is enabled for process: 98765
Environment
  • agent-device 0.21.28 (npm global)
  • macOS 15.7.5 (24G624), arm64
  • Node v24.14.0
  • ANDROID_HOME=/Users//Library/Android/sdk
Steps to reproduce
  1. Install the Android SDK/emulator, create no AVD (~/.android/avd/ is empty).
  2. Run agent-device devices --json.
Expected

No Android device listed.

Actual

One phantom entry (booted: false), with the embedded PID changing on every run:

{
  "platform": "android",
  "id": "INFO    | Storing crashdata in: /tmp/<user>/emu-crash-34.2.16.db, detection is enabled for process: 6727",
  "name": "INFO    | Storing crashdata in: /tmp/<user>/emu-crash-34.2.16.db, detection is enabled for process: 6727",
  "kind": "emulator",
  "target": "mobile",
  "booted": false
}

agent-device doctor counts it as well: device: ... Android 1 available, 0 booted.

Likely cause

The Android emulator writes that banner to stdout (verified with Python
capture_output=True; stderr is empty and exit code is 0):

$ emulator -list-avds 2>/dev/null
INFO    | Storing crashdata in: /tmp/<user>/emu-crash-34.2.16.db, detection is enabled for process: 8114

$ emulator -list-avds 2>&1 1>/dev/null   # stderr
(empty)

$ echo $?
0

So splitting stdout of emulator -list-avds by line yields one bogus "AVD" per run.
Filtering to plausible AVD names (or reading ~/.android/avd/*.ini) would avoid it.

Confirmed there is genuinely no device here: adb devices -l is empty and
~/.android/avd/ has no .ini files. The banner reproduces on every invocation
(three consecutive runs, only the PID differs).

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
5k
Forks
334
Avg merge
12h 2m
Merged PRs (30d)
678

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from callstack/agent-device

All issues in callstack/agent-device

Similar issues

More TypeScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.