WayDroid makes Android apps run smoothly on Linux mobile OS's

When someone installs an alternative Linux distribution on their phone, they can run both PC programs and Android software — but there's a catch: there are few mobile apps optimized to run on Penguin's distros. Therefore, users tend to turn to third-party solutions to run the software.

An interesting alternative under development right now is WayDroid. This solution puts Android-based systems in a container to run applications aimed at the robot system on basically any Linux distribution focused on mobile devices.

However, WayDroid shines by using the same kernel as the mobile operating system (Linux) and this allows Android applications to run nearly on metal. Naturally, the fewer intermediaries or software processing, the better the application performance (in exchange for higher resource demands).

WayDroid is compatible with systems built with the Halium 9 platform, such as Ubuntu Touch or Droidian, however, it can also run on devices with OSes built directly on a Linux kernel, such as Manjaro, from PinePhone, and PureOS, from Librem 5. Thus, it is not compatible with absolutely every Linux for mobile distro out there.

WayDroid also runs on PC

Another benefit introduced by building the WayDroid is its ability to run on the desktop. As it is compatible with mobile Linux distros, this same capability can also be reflected in systems installed on PCs.

In a way, this gives the user of Linux systems a capacity similar to Windows 11 WSA. Android apps can run more simply, without the need of virtual machines or emulators — a much more user-friendly alternative, since there is no need to allocate resources manually or deal with the virtualization issues.

Still in development

According to a developer's tweet, one of WayDroid's goals is to make the experience as unnoticeable as possible. In the future, the software should be able to eliminate the Android interface from the equation and allow apps to run as if they were native programs on any Linux distribution

A problem that WayDroid suffers these days, for example, is the lack of an emulation layer. This model suffers from the limitations of each CPU architecture — conventional devices only run x86 code, while devices with ARM are able to run only ARM. Fortunately, the platform developers are aware of this issue and hope to implement a solution in the future, leveraging components introduced in the Android subsystem for Windows 11.

Before installing WayDroid, it's worth a warning: the program is still under development, so bugs and problems should happen frequently. To give you an idea, even its installation is considerably complicated at this point.

You can find WayDroid from a code repository on GitHub. There, it is still identified as anbox-halium, an old nickname used to symbolize its purpose (no relation to the original Anbox). If you think the project is important, consider contributing to the developers' crowdfunding campaign.

WayDroid promete fazer apps de Android rodarem sem engasgos dispositivos Linux - Canaltech