Google is developing a Terminal app for Android that'll let you run Linux apps. It'll download and run Debian in a VM for you.

Google is developing a Terminal app for Android that’ll let you run Linux apps. It’ll download and run Debian in a VM for you.

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Engineers at Google started work on a new Terminal app for Android a couple of weeks ago. This Terminal app is part of the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and contains a WebView that connects to a Linux virtual machine via a local IP address, allowing you to run Linux commands from the Android host. Initially, you had to manually enable this Terminal app using a shell command and then configure the Linux VM yourself. However, in recent days, Google began work on integrating the Terminal app into Android as well as turning it into an all-in-one app for running a Linux distro in a VM.

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Google is still working on improving the Terminal app as well as AVF before shipping this feature. AVF already supports graphics and some input options, but it’s preparing to add support for backing up and restoring snapshots, nested virtualization, and devices with an x86_64 architecture. It’s also preparing to add some settings pages to the Terminal app, which is pretty barebones right now apart from a menu to copy the IP address and stop the existing VM instance. The settings pages will let you resize the disk, configure port forwarding, and potentially recover partitions.

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If you’re wondering why you’d want to run Linux apps on Android, then this feature is probably not for you. Google added Linux support to Chrome OS so developers with Chromebooks can run Linux apps that are useful for development. For example, Linux support on Chrome OS allows developers to run the Linux version of Android Studio, the recommended IDE for Android app development, on Chromebooks. It also lets them run Linux command line tools safely and securely in a container.

  • lengau@midwest.social
    20·
    1 month ago

    Much more appealing to me is running Android apps on Linux officially. I don’t want to use Android as my main system, but I sure as heck would love to have one or two Android apps available on my Linux Machines.

    • GravelPieceOfSword@lemmy.ca
      7·
      1 month ago

      wayDroid does let you do that, in a fairly lightweight way (uses Linux namespaces iirc, similar to lxc.

      It’s still not full native, which would be even nicer. I play droidfish on my Linux machines using it.

        • serenissi@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 month ago

          It always worked for me except in some cases the ‘hardware’ compositor (ie the wayland side) is a bit buggy for clipboards and inputs in general. I had issues with lxc network in past but that’s long ago.

          I still don’t understand what borked your system. Waydroid downloads the images, mounts and runs them inside lxc just like normal android. It doesn’t touch your /usr or anything else. Works well in immutable os too.

        • tetris11@lemmy.ml
          1·
          1 month ago

          It also borked the eff out of my system too, and I’m still seeing traces of its lefotver desktop files after uninstallation