Despite Google’s efforts to deprecate the Android SDK Manager standalone GUI in an attempt to force the installation of Android Studio, which is irrelevant for Cordova apps, you can still run any Android 8 and newer emulators without Android Studio using the updated SDK Manager tools. Follow these instructions to fix this.
Here are some of the issues you may encounter when trying to develop Apache Cordova mobile apps with HTML, CSS & JS for Android, iOS, Windows Phone using Microsoft Visual Studio 2017. For this and other reasons I keep using Visual Studio 2015, which has none of this problems.
