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I ditched Android emulators for this open-source app (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/android@lemmy.world
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The open source project I stumbled upon that allows you to run Android apps on PC is Waydroid....it takes a container-based approach to running a full Android system directly on Linux

Alas given how it works it only works on Linux.

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[–] 73 points 10 months ago

It's waydroid on linux.

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    [–] 30 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    Yes. Waydroid is very nice. What do you use it for? I've come to the realization I don't really need a lot of Android apps on my laptop, I have good Linux software for 99.9% of the stuff I do. So Waydroid mostly sits there, unused, while I use a regular Linux messenger client and Google Maps on the website.

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    • [+] 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    If you can get the app. I looked at Waydroid and other apps, but discovered that app I needed was only on the google play store. (I want to see when my kid's bus will arrive - there is no web site, just an app. I suspect it needs google logins or something to use, but I gave up before I figured out how to download the .apk)

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  • [–] 20 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    You can use Aurora Store, it's an open source client for the play store. Just probably don't sign into it with your real google account since it violates the play store tos

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    No, the architecture still needs to match. If you android app supports x86, you're good. Otherwise, you can technically emulate ARM64 and run it, but the performance will suck ass.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Most Apps are just Java/Kotlin code, which is converted into your CPUs instruction set at runtine.

    So usually this will not be a problem. Unless you use some kind of hyperoptimised App, which should be rare.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    wait, java (&kotlin) are cross platform?

    :O

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    • [–] 9 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    Would it work on Windows using WSL?

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    I don't think it will. If it does you will need to jump through a ton of hoops to get it working. I remember when I tried to set It up on WSL i had to manually set up anbox binders, and start dbus up every time. Even after that there were errors preventing me from doing anything beyond downloading the image.

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    • [–] 8 points 10 months ago* (3 children)

    Doesn't Waydroid require Wayland instead of XWindows?

    Because my Linux PC is also my gaming PC, which for historical reasons (used to be a Windows PC) has a NVidia card, and from what I've read Wayland is a lot more problematic with NVidia drivers than XWindows.

    Last time I went to install Waydroid I just stopped half way and reverted it because their website says it requires Wayland.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    For the past few months I've used Wayland with Bazzite and Nvidia, with no apparent issue. I might have issues or missing features I don't realize, and if there was a performance degradation it was small enough I didn't notice.

    Tldr; YMMV, but works for me

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    I'm on Pop!OS which comes with X11 by default, so I'm very wary of trying to change it to use Wayland as I don't wan't to risk breaking my gaming PC (followed by who knows how many days of mucking about with it to fix it) which is supposed to just be for coming home after work and relaxing.

    Is there another way of running Android apps on Linux?

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    i use x11 and i run weston on top of x11 and waydroid inside it. seems to work fine

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Interesting.

    I'm having a look at documentation about it and weston does indeed seem like a pretty straightforward way of having a Wayland compositor on top of X11 (or per the documentation, on top of pretty much anything) to run applications that expect such a compositor, like Waydroid.

    I think I might give that a try.

    Thanks.

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    • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    So, basically that article has been written with the purpose to show their users the BlueStacks sponsorship, while bashing on slow and clunky emulators like BlueStacks 😂

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