I used to hate android emulators, since the ones I’d tested on Windows were ad-ridden, slow bloatware.

The other day I needed to run an android app on Fedora 40.

I tried Waydroid and it worked very well. The app ran supersmooth as if it was running natively.

Also the cli syntax was very sane an user friendly.

waydroid app install|run|list …

So if you need an Android app on linux the experience might be better than what you think it would be.

  • d_k_bo
    280·
    5 months ago

    The documentation says:

    Waydroid uses Linux namespaces (user, pid, uts, net, mount, ipc) to run a full Android system in a container and provide Android applications on any GNU/Linux-based platform.

    To my understanding this isn’t even emulation but regular container technology.

    • lemmyreaderEnglish
      130·
      5 months ago5 months ago

      Yes, Waydroid uses lxc containers.

    • alteredEnvoy
      90·
      5 months ago

      Wouldn’t some Android Apps require specific builds for x86 architectures? Does Android take care of that?

        • Quack Doc
          50·
          5 months ago

          libhoudini is optimized for Intel, NDK for AMD, but some apps may be incompatible with one or the other.

      • Zangoose
        90·
        5 months ago

        A lot of android apps are built using Java/Kotlin, so you don’t actually need to care about architecture since the JVM supports both x86_64 and arm64.

        There are exceptions to this though, since some apps need to run native code. Those apps would need some sort of emulation/translation layer for the arm instructions.

      • Quack Doc
        50·
        5 months ago

        most android apps are architecure agnostic “java, kotlin etc” and even apps that are often ship “Universal binaries” which include x86, or split builds for arm and x86