Support for Android apps
Silmathoron
Public
Seen by 14
For the foreseeable futur, many people wanting to daily drive mobile Linux may still have to use Android applications (banking, etc).
At the moment, Waydroid seems to be the main way to do it, however, it may not be the most efficient way. Determining what would be the most promising method and funding its development could be interesting for this group. In particular before we decide on Waydroid camera and BT support.
In particular, other methods that I have in mind include the android translation layer or the (currrently proprietary) tooling from SailfishOS, Aliendalvik, which is apparently what is getting traction at the moment (see boiling the ocean hackfest)
Pirate Praveen Fri 27 Sep 2024 1:16PM
@Badri Sunderarajan though lighter, I think it will take longer to implement all android features or even enough features for a complicated app like Organic Maps. If anyone has a list of apps that already works, that will give us a good idea of its status.
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Pirate Praveen Sun 6 Oct 2024 7:36AM
The advantage of waydroid is, it is already Free Software. But aliendalvik seems much more integrated compared to waydroid. It is a bit disappointing to see duplicating work in waydroid / having to reverse engineer aliendalvik, but we probably have to wait till we can actually use aliendalvik in Free Software OS, but waydroid we can use right now.
Pirate Praveen Sun 6 Oct 2024 7:49AM
Reading further details at https://blogs.gnome.org/jdressler/2023/12/20/a-dive-into-jolla-appsupport/ the reverse engineering is only to enable running proprietary aliendalvik on other distros. So while interesting for some users who are willing to run a proprietary component, we can't have this as a fully Free Software solution. We will have to redo these integrations on waydroid. But good to know what all can be improved on waydroid by looking at aliendalvik.
Pirate Praveen Sun 6 Oct 2024 8:01AM
Making aliendalvik Free Software or even releasing it for other distros keeping it proprietary is entirely in Jolla's hands. We can only ask them like Jonas already did. Otherwise going through so many hoops to get aliendalvik binaries would limit its adoption to a smaller crowd.
Pirate Praveen Sun 6 Oct 2024 11:14AM
As per @alaraajavamma on our chat group, Furlabs is working on better android apps integration as well. I think they are using waydroid, but not sure.
Pirate Praveen Sun 6 Oct 2024 3:11PM
Furi Labs waydroid changes are here https://github.com/FuriLabs/waydroid/commits/trixie/
Pirate Praveen Mon 11 Nov 2024 2:34PM
FLX1 android integration is pretty neat. Waydroid comes pre installed and managing the container is integrated in system settings.
It comes with fdroid by default and installed applications are available in home screen. GPS works, microphone (no jitsi meet or monocles chat audio calls) and text to speech (no voice guided navigation) don't work yet.
I use Monocles Chat (dino hangs often), FairEmail (geary does not get new mails), NewPipe (no good youtube players), Organic Maps (pure map hangs often), Riseup VPN (gnu/linux version is broken due to qt6 transition) and Simple Chat (gnu/linux version not responsive/adapted to small screen) in waydroid.
Silmathoron Tue 12 Nov 2024 8:29AM
@Pirate Praveen good to hear!
Also worth mentioning that ATL just got funding from NLNet: https://nlnet.nl/project/ATL/
Badri Sunderarajan · Fri 27 Sep 2024 10:25AM
Android Translation Layer sounds interesting; I hadn't heard of it before. I have been using Waydroid (on laptop though) but I should try this and see if it works.
This looks like it's lighter, i.e. not simulating a full Android system (I'm guessing this based on the fact that it stores app data directly in
~/.local/share/android\_translation\_layerrather than hidden in some Android-specific filesystem as is the case with Waydroid, and the fact that the screenshots show native window borders).