the one thing linux really hasnt been made on par with winblows yet is the dreadful amount of options for android simulation -the most popular choice seems to be Waydroid, but its such an unneeded hassle to set up at all -genymotion is just slow -and than you have things like android x86 which entirely defeat the point of an emulator
I totally get what OP is asking and am constantly annoyed by the same thing.
There’s a ton of software that can ONLY be run on a mobile OS, and rather than deal with the nightmare that is a physical Android phone with all of its limitations and restrictions, it would be nice to have these things running in a VM that I can fully control. There’s software that demands access to insane and ridiculous permissions, and I’m not going to install those to my physical Android phone and deal with the privacy problems. But a completely isolated VM with burner accounts that I can run in a window on the desktop I’m already using most of the time anyway? I’ll take that. Also, I don’t see the need to shell out the ridiculous price premiums for phone models with the most storage space when I only use a handful of apps when I’m mobile anyway. An app I might need two or three times a year still takes up that space on my phone when it could easily live on a VM and be used only when I need it at home.
Also, when Android releases new version updates and my phone manufacturer doesn’t keep up? Why should I have to go out and buy a new phone just to appease the handful of apps that decide THEY want to be cutting edge and THEY’RE going to be the ones to force me to waste money? I should be able to just spin up another VM with the new Android version and use those sporadic apps on there until I decide to upgrade my phone in my own good time.
Also, Android X86 is fine, but the most problematic apps that mess with users and force apps to newer Android versions for no other reason than being “cutting-edge” aren’t made by the kinds of companies with the forethought or customer focus to provide x86 compatible apks.
Basically, I don’t see why it’s so hard to run a full virtual, sandboxed ARM emulated vanilla Android environment, or why people aren’t clamoring for this. It’s the most practical, straightforward solution to the fragmentation/bad vendor update model that physical hardware forces on us and I assume most of us hate.
YES THANK YOU i always feel like im alone in wanting an easy to use solution like this
You are DEFINITELY not alone. Every 6 months or so I come back to this and hope someone has done something, and every time I’m disappointed. I’d do it myself, but my username isn’t an ironic joke.
Running Bliss with houdini or NDK should give you a good coverage of arm applications, some still won’t work because they have various anti-emulator crap which just pickups x86 stuff. if new version is an issue, Bliss has you covered as it’s currently running A12L with A13 work underway
Had a chance to look, and you sir, just introduced me to a shiny new toy. I’ve spent the majority of today playing with Bliss and it’s the closest I’ve seen ANYTHING come so far to being EXACTLY what I want out of a virtualized Android environment. Thanks!
Apps “forcing” you to update are the result of developers doing their jobs. Just because you decided to buy a cheap phone or a free Android distro that doesn’t come with any update guarantees doesn’t mean they have to pour in money to keep things working for you.
I absolutely refuse to spend that much money on a platform with so little respect for users. You shouldn’t even NEED an update guarantee. You don’t go out and buy a computer and check for guarantees that it’s going to include OS updates… you KNOW it’s going to continue updating until the hardware physically can’t handle it anymore and you get sick of it and go upgrade it. The Android system and its heavy ROM customization and reliance on vendor updates is fundamentally broken, and it is NOT a problem to be pawned off on USERS to fix by throwing more money at it. The only reason there’s ANY difference in the Android environment vs X86 computers is because people tolerate it for whatever reason. This is a problem to be fixed, and the first responsibility for fixing this is on Google, and failing that responsible app developers should be developing for the lowest still supported Android version for SEVERAL reasons.
- I’m generalizing, but as an app developer, usually more users is better.
- If they DID it would be incentive for Google and Android manufacturers to FINALLY decouple Android updates from the hardware they run on.
- It reduces e-waste by extending the time phone hardware can be used. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is a good idea.
There are good reasons to update an app to use a new Android version. Complacency in a broken environment of continuous obsolescence as a money making scam isn’t one of them.
To do Android development, I got myself a Banana Pi, which is a Raspberry-Pi like single-board computer. They provide you with a rooted Android OS image that you can flash onto the device, and you can install whatever else you want onto it. I give it it’s own display and keyboard, but can also SSH-into it and control it from my other computers.
That’s all well and good for development, but there are other use cases than development. There are emulation solutions focused on development already, of varying quality. But there’s nothing for Android END users who simply want to be able to run software an Android environment without having to be tied to a piece of hardware and all the limitations and sacrifices that come with that.
That’s not to say this isn’t a useful option, but that’s still ONE Android environment tied to ONE piece of physical hardware.
To give an equivalent comparison… if you wanted to run multiple operating systems on your PC to have fine tuned control of different environments, you could just install a different Linux distro or Windows to multiple different VMs.
If I want to do the same thing with Android, the solution is always “Buy another device”. That’s insane. If the solution to wanting to run Debian alongside Fedora was “get a second computer”, people would be up in arms with how ridiculous and wasteful that is. But for Android, people just accept it for some reason.
The generic answer is usually that someone hasn’t felt the need to create and release one.
Open source basically means you get whatever someone else felt like creating, and they’ll usually create it to suit themselves first and foremost (which may mean having a poor user interface, or certain limitations or performance quirks).
BlueStacks is cross platform, but I have never used it so no idea what the performance is gonna be like.
"The problem is Bluestacks has not been developed for Linux so some users are thinking what is the system they should adopt to emulate Android applications on Linux.
Fortunately an alternative exists if you need a system that can do that, now we will give you the keys to install something equivalent to BlueStacks that works correctly. Genymotion"
from their website
My apologies, I saw:
BlueStacks is the famous Android emulator for PC that can now be downloaded for the Ubuntu Linux operating system but we also refer to other distributions like SUSE, Debian or Linux Mint.
And that reads clearly as being available.
But you are correct, and it’s not. That entire blog looks like a Google translate trainwreck.
and genymotion barely lets you install anything due to it using the wrong architecture
Waydroid works at native speeds for me and on NixOS installation constituted adding virtualisation.waydroid.enable = true; to my config, running waydroid init -s GAPPS and then registering it on Google’s website with the code it gives. Might be able to do it with just the nix package manager and not full blown NixOS but not sure about that
Unsure of the difficulties installing it but when it works it works flawlessly
Man! I was super excited about this, being a big NixOS fan, but then I realised that the “Way” bit is going to kick me in the nuts. I haven’t made the switch to wayland yet; I keep thinking about switching, but last time I checked being tied to i3 and nvidia hardware scared me off (although I’m aware sway is a drop-in alternative to i3, but it’s an extra complication). Another reason to make the switch when I can though!
Out of curiosity, how do big media apps treat something like Waydroid? Like, I imagine Netflix and co being awkward with anything like this in a misplaced attempted to prevent “piracy”. Do you find apps treating you like a second class citizen?
I’ve not found this yet but I’ve only used it for a few things so far, haven’t tried Netflix. Will give it a go for you in a moment
The apps I have used (plato, teams, office) have worked without a hitch so far (once I figured out I needed to install it with play services enabled)
Can’t imagine banking apps would work at all though
Wayland with Nvidia is patchy. I’ve managed to get around the issue by running integrated graphics with offloading for intensive stuff, at least with Wayland gnome I’ve found integrated is indistinguishable performance from using the GPU anyway
Just installed NixOS with Wayland and Gnome the other day on my laptop with Nvidia card. I had to tune the config a bit, but it works flawless now – notably also with the offload command. That’s fine for me though because it saves considerable energy if the GPU only runs on request.
I use Waydroid on EndeavourOS just to run Apple Music. Waydroid basically virtualises an x86 build of Android and uses containers rather than emulating an entire ARM device. The most difficult thing was getting firewalld to let Waydroid access the internet.
as far as i could find out the app i tried to run needs an arm environment (dont quote me on that cause im not a rocket scientist), so waydroid is out of the window now too
you can make a lot of stuff work with all the work you want
but some people are crazy enough they like to have it a little easier you know, linux doesnt always have to be about making things work
There’s one that you can download through Android Studio. It’s pretty good if you have Linux as your host OS, as it will share your Linux kernel rather than emulating it. I guess by definition that’s not an emulator, though, so it technically doesn’t answer your question.
I haven’t used it with Windows as my host OS since around 2016, but it was not very good back then.
