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
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.
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
The emulator with android studio might be useful, but I dunno how helpful it is for your use cases. Does require a bit of overkill to setup. I think qemu can also be used, but also probably not nice to setup. (and not sure about the architecture issue).
A few year ago there used to be a chrome extension for running Android apps, no idea if it works for Linux or even if it still works :/
I have not tried it but BlendOS claims native apk support iirc.
E: Ok, perhaps native is incorrect terminology, I just checked it and it seems to use WayDroid which was already mentioned in the thread. They ship with Aurora store and F-Droid, you can probably make those work on your distro too.
blendos sounds nice and all but its claim of being able to install any package from any distro just sounds like a nightmare to maintain, there have to be issues coming from this right?
could you perhaps sell that distro to me?
I can’t sell you something I haven’t used, even the components (distrobox and waydroid) I have not tried since I have personally no usecase for them. I mentioned BlendOS purely because from my passing look at it the android app support stuck in my memory.
The beautiful thing with linux is, you could just burn the live USB and boot the live environment to test it out for yourself, without practically any hassle or run it in VirtualBox.
As I gather you run Endeavour but then complain about the hassle of doing things in Linux. Endeavour is basically arch with a GUI installer + some extra tidbits, realistically it is as close to being arch as you can be without actually calling it arch. Arch is not a system for people who like things to just work withou “hackerma solutions”. Just look at Arch Wiki FAQ , specifically sections 1.2 and 1.6. If you want something simpler, perhaps try another distro.
endeavor was the least trouble i ever had in regard of never having any hassle, i had to jump through far more hoops trying to get certain things working in say…linux mint, than i ever had with endeavouros it makes arch actually usable instead of a nightmare to install
i just have to type 3 letters and it updates everything, no hassle, speedy and actually easy (for once)
thanks for the arch wiki link but 3 out of 4 times i have to force myself to use it, i eventually give up and search for the proper answer somewhere else cause i dont want to read the entire history of binary to understand it
Try shashlik
How is waydroid a hassle? also literally all android emulators ARE just android x86 in a VM, the VM of choice is typically virtualbox
installing some random kernel that has the modules waydroid needs watching what gpu you have, which changes the instructions a little and even than its pure luck if waydroid even manages to use these binders
id call that a hassle
Do you mean emulators such as the Android emulator that comes with Android Studio, or is the latter lacking features that other software on windows possess?
android studio is painfully slow and has not exactly a friendly userinterface (its been a couple of years)
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
