The macOS VM provided by GitHub Actions has HAXM installed so we are able to create a new AVD instance, launch an emulator with hardware acceleration, and run our Android If you want to learn more about this, here's an article I wrote: Running Android Instrumented Tests on CI. This presents a challenge on CI as to be able to run hardware accelerated emulators within a docker container, KVM must be supported by the host VM which isn't the case for cloud-based CI providers due to infrastructural limits. The modern Intel Atom (x86 and x86_64) emulators require hardware acceleration (HAXM on Mac & Windows, QEMU on Linux) from the host to run fast. The old ARM-based emulators were slow and are no longer supported by Google.
A GitHub Action for installing, configuring and running hardware-accelerated Android Emulators on macOS virtual machines.