I used to hate android emulators, since the ones I’d tested on Windows were ad-ridden, slow bloatware.

The other day I needed to run an android app on Fedora 40.

I tried Waydroid and it worked very well. The app ran supersmooth as if it was running natively.

Also the cli syntax was very sane an user friendly.

waydroid app install|run|list …

So if you need an Android app on linux the experience might be better than what you think it would be.

  • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
    4·
    2 months ago

    I think a part of your positive experience is also thanks to Linux. Android emulation works better on it because the difference between Linux and Android is not that big and definitely not as big as between Windows and Android. Though Waydroid rocks anyways

    • d_k_bo@feddit.de
      2·
      2 months ago

      The documentation says:

      Waydroid uses Linux namespaces (user, pid, uts, net, mount, ipc) to run a full Android system in a container and provide Android applications on any GNU/Linux-based platform.

      To my understanding this isn’t even emulation but regular container technology.

    • Captain Beyond@linkage.ds8.zone
      0·
      2 months ago

      Android emulation works better on it because the difference between Linux and Android is not that big

      To be clear, the difference between Linux and Android is about the same as the difference between Linux and Fedora, in that they are both Linuxes. That’s why this works, and why the reverse (running GNU/Linux apps and even entire systems on Android) is possible as well.

      • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
        0·
        2 months ago

        I meant a desktop Linux distro, not the kernel itself. And Android has a ton of bloatware on top of it so it’s not really the same thing. Android has like a double decker kernel

        • Quack Doc@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 months ago

          AOSP doesn’t have that much bloat, it’s far lighter then your typical linux distro, It’s vendors that bloat it up, Custom roms are extremely light, This is BlissOS running on 2Gb of ram https://files.catbox.moe/4n17z3.mp4.

          It’s far more responsive then many linux distros would be since android and it’s applications are optimized around low ram and low system resource in general

          • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
            01·
            2 months ago

            Android can run on 2Gb but the experience won’t be great. Linux with something like JWM or Xfce runs way better. Android 12 and higher are especially heavy. You can notice it by comparing on relatively low end devices (with like a Unisoc T606 or something). Android 14 runs better but it has ads-related stuff in it. And Android kernel itself has a lot of unnecessary stuff. They say it’s better for performance but bruh how can a more bloated thing be better? Real tests speak for themselves. Don’t trust theory and Google’s changelogs.