Played with waydroid, a platform for running android apps on linux semi-natively, for the first time ever last night. I wanted to try it out on another laptop I had, but it was armhf and that prevented me from installing wayland (I don't recall why, I think there was a key library that wasn't available on armhf)
In order to use it properly, you need to be running a distro on wayland. If you're running X, you can still run it because you can run the wayland compositor called weston on x, and all the wayland programs will run in the weston window.
Once you install waydroid, you have to run the init. It downloads a copy of lineageOS and sets up an android installation automatically.
It worked quite well even on the celeron laptop with very little memory I was playing on.
By default it doesn't install any store. You need to register with Google if you want to use the play store, I installed f-droid. Newpipe worked well, but when I tried to run moonlight it wouldn't work because it claimed there was no hardware H.264 decoding support. I'm not sure if that's due to waydroid or because of the intel integrated video chip I'm using.
Browsing worked reasonably well, since it was on a laptop I had to go into the settings and turn off on-screen keyboard.
Overall, I'd say if you have an android app that would be useful on your linux install, waydroid seems like a decent and easy to use method to run android applications.
In order to use it properly, you need to be running a distro on wayland. If you're running X, you can still run it because you can run the wayland compositor called weston on x, and all the wayland programs will run in the weston window.
Once you install waydroid, you have to run the init. It downloads a copy of lineageOS and sets up an android installation automatically.
It worked quite well even on the celeron laptop with very little memory I was playing on.
By default it doesn't install any store. You need to register with Google if you want to use the play store, I installed f-droid. Newpipe worked well, but when I tried to run moonlight it wouldn't work because it claimed there was no hardware H.264 decoding support. I'm not sure if that's due to waydroid or because of the intel integrated video chip I'm using.
Browsing worked reasonably well, since it was on a laptop I had to go into the settings and turn off on-screen keyboard.
Overall, I'd say if you have an android app that would be useful on your linux install, waydroid seems like a decent and easy to use method to run android applications.
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