Do not use the SDK tools from Android Developers downloads, these won’t work with the SDK GUI tools, as they are all command line executables only. Update your Android SDK emulator to version 27 or newer. Resolution Update your Android SDK Emulator This path can be set in Tools > Options > Tools for Apache Cordova. If you are using Visual Studio 2015 or 2017 with Tools for Apache Cordova and want to use the latest SDK instead of using the obsolete API25 and emulators provided by Visual Studio, set your ADT_HOME path to the location where you have installed the SDK using the following instructions.

If you have already updated the Android SDK tools to version 27 or newer and still get emulator related errors, please keep reading to ensure your emulators have been setup properly and according to your hardware. Starting from API 26 (Android 8.0.0) and onwards, system images are incompatible with the aging Android SDK tools version 24 and will throw all kind of startup errors or refuse to run. Errors starting Android Emulator API 27 with SDK tools 24.