1y ago

Extremely positive experience with Waydroid

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.

58 comments

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
- It took a long long time until Android emulators on Linux worked even close to what has been available on Windows.
  
  But now the windows one is getting scrapped whereas Waydroid is presumably sticking around.
  
  this is not really quite true, we have always been able to run androidx86/BlissOS in qemu which works about "as well" but with less integration, IE no "native like" windows
- 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.
  
  Yes, Waydroid uses lxc containers.
  
  Wouldn't some Android Apps require specific builds for x86 architectures? Does Android take care of that?
- 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.
  
  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
The app ran super smooth as if it was running natively
That's because it is native! Waydroid runs an android container on top of your existing kernel. You will notice that you can even see the Android processes while running Waydroid in a top utility.
- Although the Android kernel is slightly customized isn't it? I thought it exposed a few extra syscalls. How do these work on Waydroid?
  
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Waydroid#Kernel_Modules
  You must use a kernel with the android-specific modules compiled in, or use the binder_linux-dkms module. I've noticed using a kernel with them built in is generally easier to get working.
  
  some android kernels are, but AOSP itself can run perfectly happy on a vanilla kernel, just make sure your kernel was compilled with BINDER enabled, which yes, is upstream
I just tried it 3 days ago on Fedora 40, Did not run for me.
Followed their wiki
How did you setup?
- I don't remember tbh. I installed it a couple of years ago but used it for the first only recently.
- Yeah I tried it on pop os a while back and never could get it running at all
  
  Are yiu sure you're running Wayland and not X11?
- At what point did it not work for you? I just got it running on Fedora 40 following their wiki.
  
  Failed to get service waydroidplatform
  on doing waydroid app install myapk.apk
  
  ERROR: WayDroid container service is already running
  IT says already running on doing sudo waydroid container start
- You need a custom kernel, or a kernel module plus DKMS and kernel headers for your current kernel.
  You also need the package that handles whatever filesystem they use for their containers.
  Then, you need to be running it on Wayland or else it doesn't work.
  The part that I'm stuck on is running games, which gives an error about not being able to find libmain.so, which might be an architecture mismatch problem. Maybe I can virtualize that part? But at that point I might as well just buy a phone.
- can you report your issues to the waydroid github or check on the fedora forums? the matrix and telegram chats are always open to help too if you have a bit of patience.
I tried Waydroid and it worked very well. The app ran supersmooth as if it was running natively.
thats because it was running natively
- Yeah, it can't run stuff compiled for ARM, right?
  I hit a speed bump and I haven't had time to fully investigate but I too would like to run games.
  
  we can if you load libhoudini or libndk, but both are proprietary so they arent included by default, casual snek's waydroid-extras
  
  What if Fedora is running on ARM?
- see reply to casey's replly
Used it but couldn't play any media on it, which was going to be my use case. Nvidia!!!!!. But the devs and the community are quite patient and helpful in their telegram channel.
I had a similar positive experience with Gamescope, which tamed a game that freaked out every time I moved the moude onto the other monitor.
Maybe Wayland's healthy place is as a secondary window system you launch inside your normal X11 session.
- Maybe Wayland’s healthy place is as a secondary window system you launch inside your normal X11 session.
  Yeah you've got that perfectly backwards.
  Wayland allows X11 apps to open using XWayland. Not the other way around.
  Xorg's life is running short and will be largely abandoned in the near future.
  
  I admire your optimism but some governments are still using floppy disks.
  
  I think I'd be a lot more excited about Wayland if I felt like I can get a compositor that matches my tastes.
  I want to iconify things to the desktop, not relying on a taskbar-alike. Nothing seems to offer that. Hell, the taskbar is often a third party program.
  I want to double-click to shade. Labwc just added this, a feature that X11 window managers have been offering since the 90s.
  I want an aesthetic that's got real depth and skeumorphism, rather that flat and featureless. Maybe something offers that, but there are plenty of X11 choices that have beveled buttons out of the box.
  The charm of Unix systems used to be flexibility, buy Wayland seems to be an extinction-level event for traditional window management. Nothing fills the gap of FVWM or WindowMaker. But gosh, I can get 92 flavours of tiling compositor and windows that ripple when dragged.
- for many people YES! Both wayland and x11 can work very nicely when nested. For many people wayland will be remain unusable for a very long time, and for many other they are finding that now x11 is unusable for them.
  It's not a great situation, but with xwayland and running wayland compositors nested (really wish we had an "way11" too, but per app cage works for me) many people's usecase will remain to be covered

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