In linux, users can make scripts or task to run in the background by appending an ampersand (&) to the script. This will let other task to run smoothly. We have tested this behaviour with the Android emulator in Bamboo where we created a script with the following:

export ANDROID_HOME="/home/sultan/development/android-sdk-linux"
export PATH=${PATH}:${ANDROID_HOME}/platform-tools:${ANDROID_HOME}/tools
echo $PATH
emulator -avd my_android1.5 -no-window -noaudio &
echo $JAVA_HOME

The task runs smoothly with the emulator started successfully but the build keeps on running for ever unless we manually kill the emulator. This causes the build to block other tasks from running.