When building a react-native project for android you run the following command

```
react-native run-android --variant=release

```

However for a successful release build an android emulator needs to be running. If it's not you'll get the following error:

```
* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':app:installRelease'.
> com.android.builder.testing.api.DeviceException: No connected devices!

```

But I don't want to start an emulator because I'm building the project in a container that doesn't support android emulators.

Is it possible to build a react native application for Android without running an emulator?

Note:

A physical device won't work because I'm working with containers that are running in CircleCI which is a Cloud-based Continuous Integration service.