Instead, I turned to an emulator I had used before, BlueStacks. Not only that, but it's meant for developers who can add their own SSL certificates into apps, which is impractical for reverse engineering, when we usually don't have access to the source code.
Android Studio is completely unintuitive, and the emulator does not work on my machine at all. The first article I came across was from Mark Dappollone on Medium, but it was published back in 2017 and didn't address my main concern: installing Android Studio just to use its emulator is a massive waste of time and hard drive space. Instead of buying a newer phone for my needs, I started looking towards emulators.
Recently, I came across a problem: my trusty rooted Android 4 phone couldn't install an app whose API I wanted to reverse engineer, because the app was targeting Android versions 7 and above.
