With the imminent arrival of Wayland to all editions of Endless OS, i feel this is one of the most important things to consider, i know that there have been several people who have requested support for Android apps before, but this time it’s different. There is a relatively new project called Waydroid which aims to be an Android compatibility layer for GNU/Linux, allowing for near-native performance unlike emulators.
The main reason why i’m proposing this as a feature instead of an app it’s because Waydroid’s structure requires making changes to the core system, like extra kernel modules, and uses features like LXC that would obviously make it very difficult if not impossible to package it as a flatpak.
“There is Android Studio for that”
No, Android Studio is not a viable alternative, here’s why, plus it’s an IDE:
- It’s proprietary
- Flatpak package is not officially supported by Google
- Being a full emulator, it will have significant performance penalties
- It doesn’t give an ideal end-user experience overall, because it’s aimed at developers
On the other hand, Waydroid gives you:
- The ability to run Android applications with near-native performance
- Better integration with the DE
- Hence the possibility to integrate stores like F-Droid and Aurora Store directly into the Endless OS store
- a Free and Open Source compatibility layer (of course)
Please note that Waydroid is still under active development, and things like ARM emulation on x86 CPUs is missing for now, but it’s a project with a fairly high potential that is improving qucikly and Endless OS would greatly benefit from having it pre-installed at some point, Endless OS possibilities would be expanded to unsuspected limits.
Because Waydroid is Wayland-only this means older NVIDIA GPU users will be unable to use it, so is an important limitation to highlight.
I hope Endless team keep in mind this, Waydroid developers would also appreciate more support.