Note: If you try to download the Android Q Beta 2 emulator system images from within the emulator, you will be prompted to download the latest version of the emulator. If you are on the stable channel of Android Studio releases, then you might need to switch to the canary channel to be able to download this latest version of the emulator. You do not need to download all of Android Studio from the canary channel—you can download only the emulator from the canary channel from within the SDK Manager.
You have to use the Android Studio Canary build to get an updated emulator. This worked for me
Thanks to @JulianC I also set the emulator. I tried to download it standalone from the official site, but couldn't. Then switched to Canary Channel. I pressed Tools > SDK Manager, then Updates label and changed channel. Also pressed Check Now button and dismissed a dialog (Remind Me Later).
Then switch to Android SDK and updated needed emulators.
Then reverted back to Stable Channel.
After several days of work I faced some visual bugs in the emulator. Sometimes I have to restart virtual devices from AVD Manager with Cold Boot Now:
Sometimes I recreate virtual devices in AVD Manager.
As stated in the other answers, installing the update from the canary channel solves this problem. However, if you don't want to install Android Studio from canary channel, you can just use the sdkmanager tool. Just run this in the terminal:
For anyone who bumps into this issue whilst using Android's Command Line tools, --channel=3, at least on Windows, will not actually net you the latest version of the Android emulator, and thusly as it is dependent on that Emulator version, the latest Android images (particularly google_apis_playstore;x86 v8)
I was sufficiently annoyed about having a broken tool that I made a lightweight Python tool to do the steps below for most any package, which is what I link below under automated version.
This will also work for the Android Studio versions in theory, but I haven't tested those personally. Your mileage may vary.
With Python 3.6+ installed, go into the folder you cloned it to with your commandline, and run python downloadtools.py emulator (or any package name if you're looking for other packages)
That will then download and unzip the latest package for you in the location of your SDK (using env. variables ANDROID_SDK_ROOT or ANDROID_SDK_HOME)
MANUAL VERSION
To make this easiest, you'll need an existing install of the emulator
To find the latest version download URL:
Find on that XML file a <remotepackage> tag with path="emulator" featuring inside it the <channelRef> tag with 'channel-3' -- which signals latest version, locate the 'url' tag for the latest version for your platform (currently, emulator-windows-6549980.zip) and add that to the end of the previous URL -- replacing 'repository-2-1.xml'
Take note also of the major, minor, and micro tags in the archive as well. We'll need this in a moment. In this case: 30, 0, and 16 respectively to make version 30.0.16
Find your currently installed emulator package in there under folder emulator, and edit your package.xml. Replace the major, minor, and micro with the version you found in the repo (or lazily with the version you know you need, though I don't recommend this)
Finally, delete the existing install (making sure to keep your edited package.xml!) and unzip your downloaded file into there, replacing your install.
Your SDK Manager should now recognize the emulator install as the version you set, and allow you to install the latest images.