Keyboard Emulator For Android

I'm not sure what changed but the physical keyboard from my computer no longer works for the emulator (running kitkat in Nexus 5, x86). When i look in AVD at the device's advanced settings, there's nothing for a hardware keyboard. Where is this setting?

I've upgraded the SDK tools to revision 20 (from 18) and since the upgrade, the emulator doesn't seem to accept input from laptop's keyboard. But only using the emulator's own 'soft' keyboard (that appears when an input field is focused).

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I've tried reinstalling the SDK tools (and the whole SDK for that matter), uninstalled and reinstalled Eclipse Android plugins, re-created emulator devices. But none of that seem to help and its driving me mad. Its hopeless to key-in using a laptop's trackpad.

Even though the developer documentation says keyboard support is enabled by default it doesn't seem to be that way in SDK rev 20. I explicitly enabled keyboard support in my emulator's config.ini file and that worked!

Here is some workaround that actually worked for me, it is the same solution as in the most popular answer - just add hw.keyboard=yes to config.ini but since this didn't work for me I additionally

Sometimes computer keyboard stops working on android emulator. Today I've noticed, that after pushing this button (that I marked with red arrow), keyboard starts working again (seems to be some issues with emulator window focus)

Look for the hidden .android folder in your user home folder. You might rename or delete this folder, recreate your AVD, and restart the emulator. It could be there is a .ini file in that folder that has that setting munged.

Recreating an AVD with the Hardware Keyboard + setting the boolean to true was the only solution that worked for me; the other two main solutions (terminal or editing an existing AVD via GUI) both resulted in software/emulator crashes on my Mac. Making a new AVD resulted in the keyboard working just fine.

I have used an emulator for API Level 23, which does not take keyboard input for installed apk.So I have created new emulator for API Level 29, and then it works.Following is the step to install new emulator.

From there, open the avd file and you will see a list of virtual devices. Open the desired device and then open the config.ini in notepad. Then copy this text: hw.keyboard = yes and then save and close. The next time you open your emulator, you should be able to use the keyboard.

To check if this is your problem, see if pressing space actually presses one of those buttons, and if pressing tab moves the highlight focus square between elements in the emulator controls. If that is the problem, then you should be able to work around it as follows:

As a few have indicated here, the PC keyboard should be enabled for the AVD Emulator instances. Judging by what the emulator page on the Android Developer website says about key commands and such, it does not appear there is a way to enable/disable PC keyboard usage within the SDK. Your best bet is re-installing the SDK, and try again.

I'm debugging an issue with the soft keyboard display not displaying when it should. However, I don't have a device handy for testing. The problem is that the emulator never shows the soft keyboard.

This will bring up a Dialog in which case you can then disable the Hardware Keyboard by switching the hardware keyboard from on to off. This will disable the Hardware keyboard and enable the softkeyboard.

Settings > Language & input > Current keyboard > Hardware Switch ON.

It allows you to use your physical keyboard for input while at the same time showing the soft keyboard.I just tested it on Android Lollipop and it works.

What I really want to know is whether it is a hardware problem, or a software problem. Could I plug my android phone into a computer via USB and have it act as a hardware keyboard. I do not want to install anything on the computer, I want android to behave like the standard hardware.

Edit: ClarificationI want to write a program/library for android that enables the device to fully emulate an ordinary keyboard, so that the operating system reports it as a standard keyboard device, and it would work in the BIOS or anywhere else that a keyboard works.

However, if you're open to installing a driver for this behavior, It should be possible to write a custom driver that can handle Android USB protocol, and correctly translate to the correct calls/interrupts for keyboard functionality. If memory serves, every peripheral keyboard I've used in the last 10 years has needed to install a driver for full functionality, so this may not be considered non-standard behavior. (The though just occurs that this approach will only allow the device to function as a keyboard inside windows, not during the boot process)

Seems someone have done it by patching the kernel. I just came across a paper titled "Exploiting Smart-Phone USB Connectivity For Fun And Profit" by Angelos Stavrou, Zhaohui Wang, Computer Science Department George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. (available freely by googling the above title). Here the two researchers are investigating the possibility of a compromised android device controlling the attached PC by having the android device presenting itself as an HID device (keyboard). As a proof of concept, it seems that they have successfully patched a kernel doing exactly what you want. They didn't provide detailed steps but anyway I just quote what they said they've done:

I believe that you can do it if you have a rooted device with a recent Android. For example, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer running Android 4 has the libraries /system/lib/libusb.so and /system/lib/libusbhost.so, so you can write a Java application that calls them using JNI to emulate a USB keyboard. This means that you must write some glue C code that emulates the way a USB keyboard is communicating with a PC (=you must study the way the USB protocol works).

I would guess that you would have a shot at it - but it would involve recompiling the android kernel/operating system - or at least having a build environment in which you /could/ rebuild the kernel if you wanted.

You can make your android phone to work like keyboard, mouse, camera, sound streaming system, tethering device. In short what ever usb gadget you see in the market and until and unless hardware doesn't limit you. Such as speed, or gadget interface not available.

Posting to an old thread but this is what came up when I searched for it, trying to install OS on a new desktop PC with only a bluetooth keyboard, and it took me a while to figure out a working solution.

Tested working on a Pixel 4 with a recent build, but I expect this would work on other close-to-AOSP phones in 2022 like Pixel 6 too. I could at least go into boot setup for my new desktop, install an OS and pair my bluetooth keyboard, using my old laptop to send the keys remotely through the phone. Credits still go to the owners of the 2 github repos linked above for doing all the work.

But if you have an activity that sends the hardware keyboard like data via usb then why not? Won't be easy i guess. At this point the usuas forum answer comes right away: "Why don't you change your plans and ...." :)

Your Computer identifies any USB device with the USB device descriptor or the usb interface descriptor. To be able to use your android device as a keyboard, you would have to change these. Actually i think these are saved on a ROM in the device, so you would have to change hardware. The device needs to identifiy itself with the host even if its only charging in turned off state (has to tell usb host about the power consumption, otherwise only a few mA max). For me this points into the direction, that you would have to change hardware

I have some experience here as a user. The most obvious solution is via tcp/ip via a client/server model. Many of the tools out there like airkeyboard ( -keyboard-111/171415.htm) utilize this method for creating a keyboard/mouse replacement using a smartphone os. Note that there are some security issues that become apparent in the implementation. For instance, you must be logged in to utilize the server componenents.

Just installed the android sdk on my macbook pro. I created a virtual device, allotted 50mb worth of memory in android 3.0. I ran the emulator, and Android_ displays on the left, but the keyboard interface does not display on the right. I have hw.keyboard.lid enabled. Not sure if that has anything to do with it.

I just came across this problem and solved it - the default keyboard setting in the 3.0 image is set to the Japanese IME (which I'm assuming doesn't work landscape). Simply go into the settings and change it to the Android keyboard.

This works for me: I enable the "Hardware Keyboard Present" in the AVD definition. When the AVD boots up, the virtual keyboard doesn't come up in the device, but the computer's keyboard works. I then go to Settings -> Language and Input -> Keyboard and input methods -> Default. Here, I switch off the Hardware (Physical Keyboard) option. Now, both the virtual keyboard as well as the computer keyboard works -- best of both worlds.

But, as user850688 said, you have to do this everytime you boot up the AVD. If you don't want to do that, switch off the Hardware Keyboard Present setting in the AVD and you will always have the virtual keyboard, but you cannot use the computer keyboard at all.

In the Android 3.0 SDK using v11 or higher a side-keyboard is apparently no longer available by default, presumably to better emulate that the devices are all touch-screens. An AVD based on the default WVGA800 tablet skin and any AVD based on a custom screen size will not have a side emulator keyboard for you to use, and I couldn't find which setting might turn it on. However...

I was able to get a side-keyboard (very very handy for dev+testing) by downloading some older skins from and creating AVDs based on these. Somehow this enables the emulator keyboard, through some file or setting which the AVD editor doesn't make available. The window sizes and emulator keyboard placement don't exactly line up, but it beats the heck out of nothing. ff782bc1db