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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!
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.
To be honest I trust LineageOS more than I trust any Google-vended image.
FYI, Firefox has also been on the front page before, it's allowed. :)
Google provides one that runs in Docker
Isn't GSI (Project Treble) effectively now a way for Google to force deprecate the vendor bits (ex: HAL/vendor drivers)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116819
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.
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
Not sure about the proxy setup, but redroid is basically android in a docker container.
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.
Hi, Jesus from FuriLabs here! We're just winding down from FOSDEM but happy to answer any questions & feedback :)
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.
I just heard of it from this thread and took a look. It looks great! I'd love to get one, but from the FAQ:
> "The only apps that won’t work are ones that require the full Google Play Store and all it’s requirements. This includes some banking apps"
Sigh. It looks like I'd have to carry two phones.
Banking and credit card apps are essential daily apps for me. I can't even log in to some of my accounts on a desktop browser without their phone app to authenticate, and quite often individual payments require phone app confirmation. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to switch accounts for a freer user experience.
Separately from finance, I also have to use the Google suite for my main job, and I've had to use Discord for another job. I guess those can run in a browser with reduced functionality, though. Not so for the banking/credit card apps, unfortunately.
This isn't a complaint about Waydroid or FLX1. I appreciate the work and creativity! I've long dreamed of owning (and building) a completely FLOSS phone, and seen how much work is involved. I owned two Nokia N900s back in the day.
But times have changed, and I wish and hope a way can be found to run the apps or protocols daily life seems to require now, on top of (or side by side with) a base FLOSS system.
Wow, this phone is almost perfect - TRRS connector, uSD card, user-replaceable battery, and available in the United States. Not having an OLED panel might be a dealbreaker though.
How do you like the Furiphone FLX1? Very few reviews online...
Does this support DP alt mode on the USB-C port?
There’s a flatpak signal that works great in FuriOS too
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I love FairEmail, the mail client. Crazy to say this but it may be better than all the desktop mail clients I have used.
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.
I mostly see this recommended for people who want to play mobile games on a Steam Deck.
I have a "smart guitar" that needs the app to change settings. It's the only thing keeping me on a "smart" phone.
Screen record apps, that are protected in a normal phone.
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.
Exactly the same for me. I now just use and old android phone with a broken screen and run scrcpy
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.
Lots of mapping apps have no equivalent, especially with an interface optimized to work on a phone
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 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.
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.
Since Binder is a kernel feature, how do they get it to work?
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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.
Popular in 2021 (684 points, 207 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28616985
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.
What happened to Microsoft's implementation? Wasn't it supposed to come to Windows? Or did that end up by the wayside?
Might be barking up the wrong tree but how does this compare with android studios emulator?
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.
anything like this for x11?
So is it possible to have a postmarketOS device that runs Android apps at good speed with Waydroid?
waydroid is very good. its very commonly used for playing android games on linux.