run-android fails with "No connected devices!" on a cold-booting emulator (waits for adb, not for sys.boot_completed)

Environment

npx react-native info is not representative here (pnpm monorepo), so the relevant versions collected by hand:

System:
    OS: macOS 26.5.2 (25F84)
    Node: 24.15.0
    Java: openjdk 17.0.20 2026-07-21 LTS
  SDKs:
    Android SDK Platform-Tools: 37.0.0 (adb 1.0.41)
    Android Emulator: 36.6.11.0 (build_id 15507667)
  npmPackages:
    react-native: 0.86.0
    @react-native-community/cli: 20.1.0
    @react-native-community/cli-platform-android: 20.1.0

Also reproduces against main — tryLaunchEmulator.ts is unchanged since 2514405b (Apr 2024), and the two relevant lines are identical in v20.2.0.

Description

When run-android has to launch the emulator itself, and that emulator does a genuine cold boot (no quick-boot snapshot — a fresh AVD, an AVD whose snapshot was invalidated, -no-snapshot-load, or CI), the build fails:

error Failed to install the app. Command failed with exit code 1: ./gradlew app:installDevDebug …
com.android.builder.testing.api.DeviceException: No connected devices!

with Gradle having logged Device is still booting just before.

Root cause

launchEmulator in packages/cli-platform-android/src/commands/runAndroid/tryLaunchEmulator.ts treats the emulator as ready the moment adb devices lists it:

const bootCheckInterval = setInterval(async () => {
  const devices = adb.getDevices(adbPath);
  const connected = port
    ? devices.find((d) => d.includes(`${port}`))
    : devices.length > 0;
  if (connected) {
    cleanup();
    resolve(true);          // ← too early
  }
}, 1000);

adb.getDevices only keeps devices whose state is device (adb.ts#L25), which is an honest signal — but it is a signal about adbd, not about the Android framework. adbd starts early in boot; ActivityManager finishes much later. run-android therefore resolves, hands off to Gradle, and Gradle's install task refuses a device that is still booting.

Measurements

Timing one cold boot on the machine above (AVD launched at t=0):

Event	t
adb devices first reports state device	9.3 s
getprop sys.boot_completed first returns 1	20.2 s

That is a ~10.9 s window in which the current check is satisfied and the device cannot actually be installed to. Anything that fits inside that window — Gradle configuration being warm, a cached build — loses the race. Anything that takes longer than 10.9 s (a cold Gradle daemon, a first build) accidentally survives it, which is why this is so often written off as flaky.

Suggested fix

Gate on sys.boot_completed, which is set once ActivityManager has finished starting and is therefore a strictly later — and safe — signal:

adb -s <serial> shell getprop sys.boot_completed

One consequence worth calling out: with that gate in place the existing timeout = 30 no longer budgets for "adb answers", it budgets for "the whole framework is up". On this machine that is 20.2 s of the 30 s, leaving ~10 s of headroom; slower hardware and CI runners exceed it routinely. The timeout needs to grow alongside the gate, otherwise the fix converts a wrong-success into a spurious timeout.

I have this running as a local patch and can open a PR — say the word and I'll send it. (Happy to make the timeout a flag instead of a constant if you'd prefer that shape.)

Reproducible Demo

npx @react-native-community/cli init BootRace --version 0.86.0
cd BootRace

# make sure no emulator is running, and force a true cold boot
adb devices          # expect: empty
emulator -list-avds  # pick one, then wipe its snapshot:
emulator @<avd> -no-snapshot-save -wipe-data &  # let it boot once, then kill it

npx react-native run-android

The failure is timing-sensitive by nature. To see the window directly, without building anything:

emulator @<avd> -no-snapshot-load &
START=$(date +%s)
while ! adb devices | grep -q "device$"; do sleep 0.1; done
echo "adb says 'device' after $(( $(date +%s) - START ))s"
while [ "$(adb shell getprop sys.boot_completed 2>/dev/null | tr -d '\r')" != "1" ]; do sleep 0.1; done
echo "sys.boot_completed after $(( $(date +%s) - START ))s"

Every second between those two lines is a second in which run-android believes the emulator is ready and Gradle disagrees.