A few things that seem like they're consistently missing from these projects:
Hardware 3d acceleration from the host in a version of OpenGL ES + Vulkan that most phones have natively. Lastly, many apps have built-in ways of detecting that they're not running on a phone and ditch out (looking at cpuinfo and referencing that with the purported device being run).
It also seems that expected arm support on device is increasing (along with expected throughput) and that the capability of the x86 host device you need to emulate even a modest modern mobile ARM soc is getting higher and higher.
Lastly, the android version supported is almost always 3-4 generations behind the current Android. Apps are quick to drop legacy android support or run with fewer features/less optimizations on older versions of the OS. The android base version in this project is from 2020.
Anecdotally, using bluestacks (which indisputably has the most compatible and optimized emulation stack in the entire space) with a 7800X3D / RTX 3090 still runs most games slower than a snapdragon 8 phone from yesteryear running natively.
westurner 30 minutes ago [-]
virtio-gpu rutabaga was recently added to QEMU IIUC mostly by Google for Chromebook Android emulation or Android Studio or both?
I don't understand why there is not an official x86 container / ROM for Android development? Do CI builds of Android apps not run tests with recent versions of Android? How do CI builds of APKs run GUI tests without an Android container?
bsimpson 22 hours ago [-]
Surprised to see this on the frontpage - it's a well known piece of software.
It's unfortunate that there are no Google-vended images (e.g. the generic system image) that run on Waydroid. Typing my password into random ROMs from the internet sketches me out.
I wouldn't say it runs a "random ROM from the internet" - LineageOS is a very well-established project and is fully FOSS (free and open source software) except for firmware necessary for specific devices. It is the natural choice for any project, such as Waydroid, that requires good community support and ongoing availability.
Over a number of years, Google have progressively removed many of the original parts of AOSP (the FOSS foundation upon which Android is based), which means that alternative components have to be developed by projects like LineageOS. In spite of this, I suspect that LineageOS makes fewer modifications to AOSP than most phone vendors do, including Google themselves!
westurner 21 hours ago [-]
Just had a conversation about this on a waydroid github issue. The LineageOS X86 image is outdated compared to also open source Bliss OS' Android 12.
/? Android play store APK GitHub actions
It looks like Android Emulator has the most current version of Android that will run on x86?
surajrmal 19 hours ago [-]
Would you hire a well known electrician who was not bonded and insured? Sometimes it's nice to know there is more than blind trust.
yjftsjthsd-h 17 hours ago [-]
Let's assume you have a ROM straight from Google, and they've actually given you some meaningful promise to support it. How exactly are you running it? Because I'm quite confident that waydroid isn't "bonded and insured", and I rather doubt you're running on top of an operating system that is. So it seems like an odd sticking point.
5 hours ago [-]
123pie123 18 hours ago [-]
It's FOSS, you're more than welcome to inspect the code yourself
Klonoar 15 hours ago [-]
They may not want to do that, just like they may not want to fix their own electrical issues.
You’re sidestepping their point of professionalism and attempting to shove in something else.
fsflover 11 hours ago [-]
The FLOSS license allows you to rely on the community for the verification.
Klonoar 10 hours ago [-]
You are, once again, sidestepping their point.
They are saying they want a verified authority, not "the community".
rollcat 9 hours ago [-]
You're already running this on top of Linux. You're already relying on community support, unless you got scammed by Canonical[1] or RedHat^W IBM[2].
This isn't about support, this is about trusting the download.
If I get Ubuntu or Debian or download the mainline kernel, I'm trusting specific entities. That's very different from a vague idea that it's open source and hopefully someone checked if this particular random guy on github is putting out legitimate builds.
idiotsecant 7 hours ago [-]
Exactly what 'authority' would be sufficient here?
alexvitkov 7 hours ago [-]
Alright, just give me 5 minutes to quickly inspect the likely over 100,000,000 lines of code that either go directly into a ROM or are part of the build tooling, and reverse engineer however many binary blobs are involved in the process.
The "you can just read the code" mindset is completely unrealistic, even for software that's orders of magnitudes smaller. If the issue at hand is entering my Google password, I'd rather do it in a ROM built by Google.
realusername 14 hours ago [-]
There's no phone on earth which runs AOSP so it's the same on a real phone, you put a blind trust on the phone manufacturer.
saagarjha 18 hours ago [-]
Would you hire Electroboom?
kadoban 17 hours ago [-]
Probably not, he might zap himself for a gag and scare the crap out of me.
lyu07282 4 hours ago [-]
and then he teaches you about safety around a thousand times more effectively afterward <3
5 hours ago [-]
buyucu 5 hours ago [-]
To be honest I trust LineageOS more than I trust any Google-vended image.
ulrikrasmussen 11 hours ago [-]
Is it random though? LineageOS is a pretty established project. I am generally more wary of typing any personal information into an image vended by Google because it is their primary, core business model to collect my data and show me ads.
Wowfunhappy 14 hours ago [-]
FYI, Firefox has also been on the front page before, it's allowed. :)
What I’d love to see is a containerized android that can be fired up on a Mac (using docker desktop or orbstack or whatever) that I can modify the docker image of to have rooted man in the middle proxy already setup, making it much easier to drop an Android app onto to observe the network traffic and api calls.
CartwheelLinux 19 hours ago [-]
If you want to do this now with little setup, run waydroid and then run wireshark inside the network namespace that is created for waydroid
sudo ip netns exec <netns> wireshark
jeroenhd 19 hours ago [-]
Wireshark is nice, but for HTTPS MitM you'll need a tool like mitmproxy/Burp to do the proxying and either modifications to the system image or a Frida daemon running as root to make most apps trust the MitM'd certificates.
To get the traffic routed right, the Wireguard option for mitmproxy is pretty useful in my experience. Not sure how well Waydroid + Android VPNs work together, though.
wraptile 15 hours ago [-]
There's also certificate pinning which is done by basically every modern android app so you often need to modify apk to remove that. Httptoolkit has a good blog on the process: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-certificate-pinning/
jeroenhd 10 hours ago [-]
With root access, Frida can patch applications in memory, so you don't need to mess with the APK file.
If root is not an option, injecting Frida into the APK will work (but that might break applications that verify signatures).
feanaro 17 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by the Wireguard option for mitmproxy?
It's a pretty neat feature! I think it's in beta but it works flawlessly in my experience. Sure is a lot easier than setting up a separate (W)LAN with iptables rules to force redirect traffic.
16 hours ago [-]
bbogdn2 7 hours ago [-]
Not sure about the proxy setup, but redroid is basically android in a docker container.
jaidan 21 hours ago [-]
This was the basis of how FuriLabs managed to get such good Android app integration. Obviously they’ve forked it [0] and heavily modified it, but the user experience they’ve created with this to allow Android apps on a Linux phone has been great.
My biggest question is: why haven’t you guys advertised yourselves more? I’ve heard of liberem and the pinephone but never knew you guys had a phone? With half-decent hardware and actual water proofing?? I swear if I had the disposable cash I’d have bought one (and I hope to anyway soon).
Ok, here’s a more typical question: I’ve heard your phone uses halium, what exactly is it? Some kind of hardware abstraction layer? Some people online appear to dislike it. (And googling unfortunately gives very few links that aren’t super technical.)
GranPC 8 hours ago [-]
I'd say it just boils down to... we're not great at marketing. We're working on it but it's hard to get the word out, especially since many people are dismissive of Linux phones after having had previous experiences with incomplete devices.
Halium/libhybris are basically layers that allow us to use Android hardware drivers with a GNU/Linux userspace. Some Android bits run inside a container to provide support for peripherals. This is kinda a stop gap solution since we're working on native implementations and replacements for much of this stuff.
Some people dislike it because it's not a "pure Linux phone". But the alternative would be to ship a device that can't even place calls or take pictures, so... I think it's a good middle ground that allows us to ship something useful today.
throwaway984393 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Klonoar 15 hours ago [-]
They’ve been noted in a few HN threads before, FWIW.
ttkari 3 hours ago [-]
Your project certainly looks very interesting! Any chance of another device with a smaller form factor sometime in the future? This one is huge :)
moondev 20 hours ago [-]
I'm interested in why the linked implementation is different or enhanced. There is nothing on the readme and I guess I would need to track down a summary of the talk
GranPC 7 hours ago [-]
Waydroid is currently focusing on desktop usage, whereas our fork focuses around usability improvements for the mobile use case specifically. There are a lot of small things that all come together - stuff like NFC passthrough, power efficiency optimizations, MPRIS support, etc. It'd be hard to condense everything into a small explanation, but it's basically been a matter of polishing rough edges.
Vinnl 5 hours ago [-]
Will that stuff end up upstream at some point, and if not, where's the bottleneck?
OsrsNeedsf2P 19 hours ago [-]
What's the difference between FuriLabs and all the other Linux phones that have 1 hour of battery life and no app support?
yjftsjthsd-h 17 hours ago [-]
> all the other Linux phones that have 1 hour of battery life and no app support?
... Which phones would that be? Even the original pinephone exceeds an hour and has a pretty good collection of apps even without compatibility layers.
seabass-labrax 8 hours ago [-]
Indeed; I have an original PinePhone (convergence edition) and the battery is not half bad while you are using it. I think the main issue has been poor software support for wake-from-suspend, which prevented the phone from saving power when not in use. I believe that these issues have been largely resolved in the latest versions of PostmarketOS, Mobian etc.
Arnavion 2 hours ago [-]
FYI, going to suspend / receiving calls during suspend / waking from suspend haven't been a general problem on the (non-Pro) PinePhone since 2021. You just have to make sure to switch to the FOSS modem firmware, and occasionally there are regressions (the most recent one being https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager... ).
jaidan 16 hours ago [-]
FLX1 is fast. It’s useful. It has regular updates that improve experience. Battery lasts 1.5 days with moderate usage.
stonogo 10 hours ago [-]
FuriLabs' phone runs libhybris (OEM android kernel) instead of attempting a native port. Hardware enablement is outsourced.
toasteros 17 hours ago [-]
The Furiphone FLX1 makes heavy use of this and it is amazing. I can do most things I'd want a real android phone for (which is not much, admittedly). I know of people who use it for Signal and Spotify. Great project, and right at home on a Linux phone.
ankurdhama 15 hours ago [-]
Does this support DP alt mode on the USB-C port?
toasteros 2 hours ago [-]
No DP through the USB-C port right now, no. I believe it's missing from the hardware.
It's a little frustrating because "Convergence" options are exposed in the UI.
jaidan 15 hours ago [-]
There’s a flatpak signal that works great in FuriOS too
Vinnl 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't that the desktop app? Which is neat, but needs to be linked to the phone app, AFAIK.
ekianjo 15 hours ago [-]
How do you like the Furiphone FLX1? Very few reviews online...
You guys should send our some review units to Linux tech youtubers. I kept searching for reviews of the phone and there is nothing except the 4-5 videos from your guys' channel, which does not instill confidence that this is a real project and not a scam.
GranPC 5 hours ago [-]
We have - I believe the first review will be coming out this week. More soon.
I have three apps I bought a long time ago. A Swedish dictionary, a german-swedish dictionary and an english-swedish dictionary.
They are still installable, but not available in the app store. The company (Norstedts) went over to a subscription style (of course).
I use waydroid to have them on my desktop and I love it.
Klasiaster 11 hours ago [-]
Many apps depend on running an "official" Android distro from Google, Samsung, etc. and don't work with Waydroid's Lineage-based distro. I think the Wine-like approach from https://gitlab.com/android_translation_layer/android_transla... might help to trick apps into believing that they run on an "official" Android distro.
notpushkin 2 hours ago [-]
There is a set of specific APIs you have to simulate to trick apps like this. On “real” Android, such simulation is done with things like Magisk modules (which mock certain things) or microG (which reimplementats Google services as a whole). The Wine-like approach used in ATL is certainly more straightforward for simulating APIs, but it’s still needs to be reimplemented specifically for ATL. Waydroid, on the other hand, can probably reuse Magisk or microG, since it’s running a whole Android setup.
WD-42 16 hours ago [-]
Every time I see this I think "cool! I can run some cool Android app that doesn't have a Linux counterpart" and every time I fail to think of anything. Are there any must have Android apps out there?
jraph 11 hours ago [-]
Organic Maps and OSMAnd. They are better than open source desktop map software I could find.
Organic Maps has a desktop linux version but it's far from having feature parity.
Although it might change with this grant [1] aiming to build a nice desktop UI for Organic Maps.
The main thing for me would be stuff like banking which require app-based authentication. Of course, solutions like this unfortunately don't work on something like Waydroid because the app knows it's in a container and thus blocks functionality.
sureglymop 12 hours ago [-]
I love FairEmail, the mail client. Crazy to say this but it may be better than all the desktop mail clients I have used.
bsdice 6 hours ago [-]
I tried them all (also anything on Linux) and now I just use Roundcube on a local install, which runs in any browser.
bowbe 16 hours ago [-]
I mostly see this recommended for people who want to play mobile games on a Steam Deck.
prmoustache 9 hours ago [-]
But are there still mobile games worth playing when you have access to steam?
bobthecowboy 28 minutes ago [-]
Somewhat weirdly, if you want to play Minecraft Bedrock (not the classic Java version, but the one developed for handhelds, consoles, and Windows) on the SteamDeck this appears to be the most solid path. I've played it and it works.
razemio 9 hours ago [-]
TFT from Riot Games would be a good example. Protected by Vanguard so you can not use wine. However you need an arm device, since they do not publish apks for x86.
zozbot234 3 hours ago [-]
Couldn't you use qemu-user (and binfmt_misc) to run ARM binaries under emulation on x86? I suppose you might also need ARM-specific system libraries installed - these can easily coexist with their x86-64 versions on a standard Linux install (see "multiarch") but I'm not sure if Android allows the same.
alias_neo 9 hours ago [-]
I use it for this; found out about it when I installed Bazzite on my ROG Ally and it came with Waydroid.
The other useful feature for me is using the Android apps for media subscriptions that only enable offline downloads in the app and not in the browser so I can use them on the go.
WD-42 16 hours ago [-]
Ahhh, that actually makes a lot of sense. I didn't even think of games. Maybe I'll use it to play Candy Crush.
saghm 14 hours ago [-]
Isn't there already a PC version of that? It always seems to be pinned to the Start menu of new Windows installations, but maybe that's also via some sort of Android compatibility layer
Perenti 14 hours ago [-]
I have a "smart guitar" that needs the app to change settings. It's the only thing keeping me on a "smart" phone.
seabass-labrax 8 hours ago [-]
By 'smart guitar', do you mean that the guitar has an amplifier or effect pedal built-in?
buyucu 5 hours ago [-]
I use Waydroid to run my banking apps on my laptop. Much more convenient than going through many layers of authentication each time on internet banking.
ollybee 7 hours ago [-]
Exactly the same for me. I now just use and old android phone with a broken screen and run scrcpy
mihalycsaba 8 hours ago [-]
Screen record apps, that are protected in a normal phone.
MiddleEndian 15 hours ago [-]
For me it seems useful for the opposite reason. There's a lot of garbage that you have to use where something could be a website but they want you to install some Android app. If I could run those Android apps on my PC, maybe it could be a slightly less terrible experience. Perhaps various dating apps as well, idk.
reginald78 4 hours ago [-]
Minecraft Bedrock?
CarVac 14 hours ago [-]
Realcalc?
Demiurge 21 hours ago [-]
Does this allow the container access a hardware USB device? I have Mooondrop FreeDSP usb-c cable with an PEQ that only works with a terrible Android app, and it takes forever to change the EQ settings via an Android tablet I have, that has terrible touch screen. I wish I could just use my linux laptop to do it.
A binder transaction behaves sort of like a syscall, in the sense that a client process can immediately, synchronously transfer control to a server thread, rather than just enqueueing a message to be processed whenever the server gets around to it.
This enables Android to separate many of its components into different processes (at different privilege levels), and use binder for RPCs that are on the "critical path" for user interaction, without incurring impractical amounts of overhead or latency.
esprehn 21 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia has a good explanation of Binder and the history which goes way back to Be OS.
While it's part of upstream Linux, many kernels come with it disabled because it has a long history of security issues and basically nothing but Android uses it.
It also liked to trigger kernel panics for me on Ubuntu 22.04, but that could be a weird hardware issue.
refulgentis 19 hours ago [-]
Ah, interesting...man, software is fun. I wouldn't have guessed in a million years that it could cause panics as an optional component, like, it shouldn't be running code unless it is being used, and it shouldn't be called because it isn't mandatory in the kernel.
I guess I'm still grokking software complexity, Linux, and how much work an OS is truly is, 25 years after I built my first Linux box...because in another sense, of course that could happen.
tuananh 16 hours ago [-]
easiest way is to use zen kernel because it's already baked in.
account-5 7 hours ago [-]
Might be barking up the wrong tree but how does this compare with android studios emulator?
redleader55 3 hours ago [-]
Let me list of few things that I can think of:
- (pro) It run on a laptop/desktop so it's performance will be a lot better
- (con) If the app has any native code inside it, it will need to support x86_64 or you'll need to have an ARM laptop
- (con) Like many in the thread mentioned, some apps will require Google features to even start.
- (con) I'm not sure if Waydroid will report secure boot features to the apps that require it.
kllrnohj 2 hours ago [-]
The emulator these days is just using an x86_64 image and with not-that-modern VM hardware extensions the overhead is pretty small.
So I'd expect CPU performance to be very similar if not basically identical.
GPU performance would be the bigger question, and the emulator has put a lot of work in that direction. Is this better or worse than that would be the biggest difference performance-wise.
arghwhat 7 hours ago [-]
Waydroid runs Android services and applications natively on your machine in a container with apps launching in windows side-by-side with your other applications, whereas the Android emulator runs a VM with regular smartphone-esque hardware.
Quite a big difference.
kllrnohj 2 hours ago [-]
The emulator is just KVM. Yes VMs vs. container is a difference, just like it is in endless cloud discussions, but it's not particularly big in any objective metrics
mauvehaus 19 hours ago [-]
I got on instagram[0] before you could post via the web and before I had a smartphone. I was able to run the app under android-x86 on VirtualBox.
I think the hardest part of the whole setup was setting the screen resolution to something the ig app would run under (it wouldn't run in landscape mode) and getting ssh/scp running to move files from the computer to the vm.
[0] for professional reasons. Link in profile if you're interested. My insta posting had been greatly reduced since I'm still not convinced that anyone has truly found a way to redeem imaginary internet points for dollars. At least not at my level of effort I'm willing to put into accumulating imaginary internet points.
Yes, skimming the repo on GitHub it looks like it has gone off the boil distinctly since early 2024. Shame as it looks impressive.
tedk-42 16 hours ago [-]
Money became scarce and projects became harder to maintain and resource
scottydelta 19 hours ago [-]
Any way to do this in Mac M1? I would love to run an android instance on Mac docker where u can install apps and can persist storage.
truncate 11 hours ago [-]
I was able to run this a while ago on virtualized linux machine using UTM. I forgot whether I used ARM or x86 on Rosetta image, but UTM gallery has easy to use images for both. https://mac.getutm.app/gallery/
ebri 11 hours ago [-]
anything like this for x11?
TheFreim 11 hours ago [-]
I haven't tried it yet, but I did find this guide that might be useful:
Waydroid is based on Anbox (https://github.com/anbox) which is no longer being maintained, but should still work for older Android versions on LTS distros.
buyucu 5 hours ago [-]
I think you can use something like Weston in X11 to run Waydroid.
CodeCompost 12 hours ago [-]
What happened to Microsoft's implementation? Wasn't it supposed to come to Windows? Or did that end up by the wayside?
Wii2 10 hours ago [-]
You probably mean WSA, Windows Subsystem for Android, only available on Windows 11… for another month. At which point support for it will be dropped[0]. It's a bit sad 'cause I, myself, do use it for a few things.
Also, by default it required installing the Amazon Appstore, which I don't think is available for download anymore. So the only way to use it now would be to use the script from the MagiskOnWSA[1] which downloads it somehow, and at the same time, installs Magisk. If that even works.
It looks like it fell apart because none of the existing app stores wanted to support it (Amazon originally did, then pulled out), and Microsoft, in a rare moment of clarity, realized that nobody likes the Microsoft Store.
Hackbraten 10 hours ago [-]
Actually, Wayside would have been a nice name for the software that became Waydroid.
tmtvl 18 hours ago [-]
On my Ubuntu phone I use Waydroid to use the WhatsApp client as the kung fu club I'm in uses WA to communicate. It works well enough, though it is quite a battery drainer.
tuananh 11 hours ago [-]
waydroid is very good. its very commonly used for playing android games on linux.
sweeter 22 hours ago [-]
What Im surprised about is that no one has abstracted this out so you can run multiple Android containers under LXC. With Waydroid, you have one image. From what I can see they use a custom Linux kernel with a lot of patches and I wasn't really able to get a handle on it, but the LXC interface stuff is pretty simple.
bean-weevil 19 hours ago [-]
Waydroid uses the host kernel.
ekianjo 15 hours ago [-]
So is it possible to have a postmarketOS device that runs Android apps at good speed with Waydroid?
seabass-labrax 8 hours ago [-]
Yes! Here's a video (not mine) showing exactly that:
It also seems that expected arm support on device is increasing (along with expected throughput) and that the capability of the x86 host device you need to emulate even a modest modern mobile ARM soc is getting higher and higher.
Lastly, the android version supported is almost always 3-4 generations behind the current Android. Apps are quick to drop legacy android support or run with fewer features/less optimizations on older versions of the OS. The android base version in this project is from 2020.
Anecdotally, using bluestacks (which indisputably has the most compatible and optimized emulation stack in the entire space) with a 7800X3D / RTX 3090 still runs most games slower than a snapdragon 8 phone from yesteryear running natively.
virtio-gpu-rutabaga: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/devices/virtio-gpu.h...
Rutabaga Virtual Graphics Interface: https://crosvm.dev/book/appendix/rutabaga_gfx.html
gfxstream: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/hardware/google/gf...
"Gfxstream Merged Into Mesa For Vulkan Virtualization" (2024-09) https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Gfxstream-Merged
I don't understand why there is not an official x86 container / ROM for Android development? Do CI builds of Android apps not run tests with recent versions of Android? How do CI builds of APKs run GUI tests without an Android container?
It's unfortunate that there are no Google-vended images (e.g. the generic system image) that run on Waydroid. Typing my password into random ROMs from the internet sketches me out.
https://source.android.com/docs/core/tests/vts/gsi
Over a number of years, Google have progressively removed many of the original parts of AOSP (the FOSS foundation upon which Android is based), which means that alternative components have to be developed by projects like LineageOS. In spite of this, I suspect that LineageOS makes fewer modifications to AOSP than most phone vendors do, including Google themselves!
/? Android play store APK GitHub actions
It looks like Android Emulator has the most current version of Android that will run on x86?
You’re sidestepping their point of professionalism and attempting to shove in something else.
They are saying they want a verified authority, not "the community".
[1]: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/Ubuntu2404Bpf...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag
If I get Ubuntu or Debian or download the mainline kernel, I'm trusting specific entities. That's very different from a vague idea that it's open source and hopefully someone checked if this particular random guy on github is putting out legitimate builds.
The "you can just read the code" mindset is completely unrealistic, even for software that's orders of magnitudes smaller. If the issue at hand is entering my Google password, I'd rather do it in a ROM built by Google.
sudo ip netns exec <netns> wireshark
To get the traffic routed right, the Wireguard option for mitmproxy is pretty useful in my experience. Not sure how well Waydroid + Android VPNs work together, though.
If root is not an option, injecting Frida into the APK will work (but that might break applications that verify signatures).
EDIT: Oh, look at this https://mitmproxy.org/posts/wireguard-mode/. TIL.
[0] https://github.com/FuriLabs/waydroid
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/furiphone_flx1/
Ok, here’s a more typical question: I’ve heard your phone uses halium, what exactly is it? Some kind of hardware abstraction layer? Some people online appear to dislike it. (And googling unfortunately gives very few links that aren’t super technical.)
Halium/libhybris are basically layers that allow us to use Android hardware drivers with a GNU/Linux userspace. Some Android bits run inside a container to provide support for peripherals. This is kinda a stop gap solution since we're working on native implementations and replacements for much of this stuff.
Some people dislike it because it's not a "pure Linux phone". But the alternative would be to ship a device that can't even place calls or take pictures, so... I think it's a good middle ground that allows us to ship something useful today.
... Which phones would that be? Even the original pinephone exceeds an hour and has a pretty good collection of apps even without compatibility layers.
It's a little frustrating because "Convergence" options are exposed in the UI.
There's a review from The Register that just came out: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/furiphone_flx1/
I love it.
No DP Alt mode.
They are still installable, but not available in the app store. The company (Norstedts) went over to a subscription style (of course).
I use waydroid to have them on my desktop and I love it.
Organic Maps has a desktop linux version but it's far from having feature parity.
Although it might change with this grant [1] aiming to build a nice desktop UI for Organic Maps.
[1] https://nlnet.nl/project/OrganicMaps-ConvergentUI/
The other useful feature for me is using the Android apps for media subscriptions that only enable offline downloads in the app and not in the browser so I can use them on the go.
If not, it's just a Linux container, so with some udev rules you should be able to make it work regardless.
A binder transaction behaves sort of like a syscall, in the sense that a client process can immediately, synchronously transfer control to a server thread, rather than just enqueueing a message to be processed whenever the server gets around to it.
This enables Android to separate many of its components into different processes (at different privilege levels), and use binder for RPCs that are on the "critical path" for user interaction, without incurring impractical amounts of overhead or latency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBinder
It's more like a micro services framework that abstracts threads and processes.
Fuchsia takes the approach to the conclusion and powers the entire OS through a similar system:
https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/fidl/overview
https://brauner.io/2019/01/09/android-binderfs.html
It also liked to trigger kernel panics for me on Ubuntu 22.04, but that could be a weird hardware issue.
I guess I'm still grokking software complexity, Linux, and how much work an OS is truly is, 25 years after I built my first Linux box...because in another sense, of course that could happen.
- (pro) It run on a laptop/desktop so it's performance will be a lot better
- (con) If the app has any native code inside it, it will need to support x86_64 or you'll need to have an ARM laptop
- (con) Like many in the thread mentioned, some apps will require Google features to even start.
- (con) I'm not sure if Waydroid will report secure boot features to the apps that require it.
So I'd expect CPU performance to be very similar if not basically identical.
GPU performance would be the bigger question, and the emulator has put a lot of work in that direction. Is this better or worse than that would be the biggest difference performance-wise.
Quite a big difference.
I think the hardest part of the whole setup was setting the screen resolution to something the ig app would run under (it wouldn't run in landscape mode) and getting ssh/scp running to move files from the computer to the vm.
[0] for professional reasons. Link in profile if you're interested. My insta posting had been greatly reduced since I'm still not convinced that anyone has truly found a way to redeem imaginary internet points for dollars. At least not at my level of effort I'm willing to put into accumulating imaginary internet points.
https://github.com/1999AZZAR/use-waydroid-on-x11
If you try it please let me know how it went.
[0] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/ [1] - https://github.com/LSPosed/MagiskOnWSALocal
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N-Q0c3iy-5g