Waydroid – Android in a Linux container
157 comments
·February 2, 2025bsimpson
seabass-labrax
I wouldn't say it runs a "random ROM from the internet" - LineageOS is a very well-established project and is fully FOSS (free and open source software) except for firmware necessary for specific devices. It is the natural choice for any project, such as Waydroid, that requires good community support and ongoing availability.
Over a number of years, Google have progressively removed many of the original parts of AOSP (the FOSS foundation upon which Android is based), which means that alternative components have to be developed by projects like LineageOS. In spite of this, I suspect that LineageOS makes fewer modifications to AOSP than most phone vendors do, including Google themselves!
westurner
Just had a conversation about this on a waydroid github issue. The LineageOS X86 image is outdated compared to also open source Bliss OS' Android 12.
/? Android play store APK GitHub actions
It looks like Android Emulator has the most current version of Android that will run on x86?
surajrmal
Would you hire a well known electrician who was not bonded and insured? Sometimes it's nice to know there is more than blind trust.
yjftsjthsd-h
Let's assume you have a ROM straight from Google, and they've actually given you some meaningful promise to support it. How exactly are you running it? Because I'm quite confident that waydroid isn't "bonded and insured", and I rather doubt you're running on top of an operating system that is. So it seems like an odd sticking point.
lotharcable2
What software are you using that has a parent company that pays out damages to you if it fails?
Because that is the purpose of 'bonded and insured'.
I haven't looked at every EULA and license of every piece of software I use, but I bet that "without warranty" clauses are part of every single one of them.
realusername
There's no phone on earth which runs AOSP so it's the same on a real phone, you put a blind trust on the phone manufacturer.
123pie123
It's FOSS, you're more than welcome to inspect the code yourself
powersnail
Different industries have different standard procedures. A huge portion of the world's internet relies on FOSS software, and none of those are insured.
Community reputation is the current _de facto_ standard for consumer-facing software, even for stuff sold by big corporations. There's not much else to rely on.
saagarjha
Would you hire Electroboom?
ulrikrasmussen
Is it random though? LineageOS is a pretty established project. I am generally more wary of typing any personal information into an image vended by Google because it is their primary, core business model to collect my data and show me ads.
buyucu
To be honest I trust LineageOS more than I trust any Google-vended image.
Wowfunhappy
FYI, Firefox has also been on the front page before, it's allowed. :)
Onavo
Google provides one that runs in Docker
ignoramous
Isn't GSI (Project Treble) effectively now a way for Google to force deprecate the vendor bits (ex: HAL/vendor drivers)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116819
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dchuk
What I’d love to see is a containerized android that can be fired up on a Mac (using docker desktop or orbstack or whatever) that I can modify the docker image of to have rooted man in the middle proxy already setup, making it much easier to drop an Android app onto to observe the network traffic and api calls.
CartwheelLinux
If you want to do this now with little setup, run waydroid and then run wireshark inside the network namespace that is created for waydroid
sudo ip netns exec <netns> wireshark
jeroenhd
Wireshark is nice, but for HTTPS MitM you'll need a tool like mitmproxy/Burp to do the proxying and either modifications to the system image or a Frida daemon running as root to make most apps trust the MitM'd certificates.
To get the traffic routed right, the Wireguard option for mitmproxy is pretty useful in my experience. Not sure how well Waydroid + Android VPNs work together, though.
wraptile
There's also certificate pinning which is done by basically every modern android app so you often need to modify apk to remove that. Httptoolkit has a good blog on the process: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/frida-certificate-pinning/
feanaro
What do you mean by the Wireguard option for mitmproxy?
EDIT: Oh, look at this https://mitmproxy.org/posts/wireguard-mode/. TIL.
null
bbogdn2
Not sure about the proxy setup, but redroid is basically android in a docker container.
jaidan
This was the basis of how FuriLabs managed to get such good Android app integration. Obviously they’ve forked it [0] and heavily modified it, but the user experience they’ve created with this to allow Android apps on a Linux phone has been great.
GranPC
Hi, Jesus from FuriLabs here! We're just winding down from FOSDEM but happy to answer any questions & feedback :)
user_7832
My biggest question is: why haven’t you guys advertised yourselves more? I’ve heard of liberem and the pinephone but never knew you guys had a phone? With half-decent hardware and actual water proofing?? I swear if I had the disposable cash I’d have bought one (and I hope to anyway soon).
Ok, here’s a more typical question: I’ve heard your phone uses halium, what exactly is it? Some kind of hardware abstraction layer? Some people online appear to dislike it. (And googling unfortunately gives very few links that aren’t super technical.)
GranPC
I'd say it just boils down to... we're not great at marketing. We're working on it but it's hard to get the word out, especially since many people are dismissive of Linux phones after having had previous experiences with incomplete devices.
Halium/libhybris are basically layers that allow us to use Android hardware drivers with a GNU/Linux userspace. Some Android bits run inside a container to provide support for peripherals. This is kinda a stop gap solution since we're working on native implementations and replacements for much of this stuff.
Some people dislike it because it's not a "pure Linux phone". But the alternative would be to ship a device that can't even place calls or take pictures, so... I think it's a good middle ground that allows us to ship something useful today.
Klonoar
They’ve been noted in a few HN threads before, FWIW.
beardyw
And in the news today:
bacchusracine
I know I'm late to the discussion but can you comment on the hearing aid compatibility (HAC) of the phone? It's something that keeps me tethered to bigger name phones since most of the time smaller companies don't even know what that is...
moondev
I'm interested in why the linked implementation is different or enhanced. There is nothing on the readme and I guess I would need to track down a summary of the talk
GranPC
Waydroid is currently focusing on desktop usage, whereas our fork focuses around usability improvements for the mobile use case specifically. There are a lot of small things that all come together - stuff like NFC passthrough, power efficiency optimizations, MPRIS support, etc. It'd be hard to condense everything into a small explanation, but it's basically been a matter of polishing rough edges.
ttkari
Your project certainly looks very interesting! Any chance of another device with a smaller form factor sometime in the future? This one is huge :)
OsrsNeedsf2P
What's the difference between FuriLabs and all the other Linux phones that have 1 hour of battery life and no app support?
stonogo
FuriLabs' phone runs libhybris (OEM android kernel) instead of attempting a native port. Hardware enablement is outsourced.
yjftsjthsd-h
> all the other Linux phones that have 1 hour of battery life and no app support?
... Which phones would that be? Even the original pinephone exceeds an hour and has a pretty good collection of apps even without compatibility layers.
toasteros
The Furiphone FLX1 makes heavy use of this and it is amazing. I can do most things I'd want a real android phone for (which is not much, admittedly). I know of people who use it for Signal and Spotify. Great project, and right at home on a Linux phone.
jlokier
I just heard of it from this thread and took a look. It looks great! I'd love to get one, but from the FAQ:
> "The only apps that won’t work are ones that require the full Google Play Store and all it’s requirements. This includes some banking apps"
Sigh. It looks like I'd have to carry two phones.
Banking and credit card apps are essential daily apps for me. I can't even log in to some of my accounts on a desktop browser without their phone app to authenticate, and quite often individual payments require phone app confirmation. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to switch accounts for a freer user experience.
Separately from finance, I also have to use the Google suite for my main job, and I've had to use Discord for another job. I guess those can run in a browser with reduced functionality, though. Not so for the banking/credit card apps, unfortunately.
This isn't a complaint about Waydroid or FLX1. I appreciate the work and creativity! I've long dreamed of owning (and building) a completely FLOSS phone, and seen how much work is involved. I owned two Nokia N900s back in the day.
But times have changed, and I wish and hope a way can be found to run the apps or protocols daily life seems to require now, on top of (or side by side with) a base FLOSS system.
AgentElement
Wow, this phone is almost perfect - TRRS connector, uSD card, user-replaceable battery, and available in the United States. Not having an OLED panel might be a dealbreaker though.
ekianjo
How do you like the Furiphone FLX1? Very few reviews online...
GranPC
FWIW there are a bunch of reviews on our official website, as well as this exhaustive review from a community member: https://blog-d.luigi311.com/furilabs-flx1/
KetoManx64
You guys should send our some review units to Linux tech youtubers. I kept searching for reviews of the phone and there is nothing except the 4-5 videos from your guys' channel, which does not instill confidence that this is a real project and not a scam.
jaidan
Yep. Been daily driving since September.
I love it.
No DP Alt mode.
ankurdhama
Does this support DP alt mode on the USB-C port?
toasteros
No DP through the USB-C port right now, no. I believe it's missing from the hardware.
It's a little frustrating because "Convergence" options are exposed in the UI.
jaidan
There’s a flatpak signal that works great in FuriOS too
Vinnl
Isn't that the desktop app? Which is neat, but needs to be linked to the phone app, AFAIK.
jaidan
Yeah it is. I have the Signal app installed in Android, but I only use it to initiate the Signal setup. Then use the desktop flatpak in FuriOS as my daily driver. You can change the look of it to be similar to the mobile app and a recent change (like a week ago) has made resizing the contact list easier from a touch screen rather than having to use a mouse the first time.
The Telegram and Matrix channels have been great for people sharing tips like this.
bjoli
I have three apps I bought a long time ago. A Swedish dictionary, a german-swedish dictionary and an english-swedish dictionary.
They are still installable, but not available in the app store. The company (Norstedts) went over to a subscription style (of course).
I use waydroid to have them on my desktop and I love it.
Klasiaster
Many apps depend on running an "official" Android distro from Google, Samsung, etc. and don't work with Waydroid's Lineage-based distro. I think the Wine-like approach from https://gitlab.com/android_translation_layer/android_transla... might help to trick apps into believing that they run on an "official" Android distro.
notpushkin
There is a set of specific APIs you have to simulate to trick apps like this. On “real” Android, such simulation is done with things like Magisk modules (which mock certain things) or microG (which reimplementats Google services as a whole). The Wine-like approach used in ATL is certainly more straightforward for simulating APIs, but it’s still needs to be reimplemented specifically for ATL. Waydroid, on the other hand, can probably reuse Magisk or microG, since it’s running a whole Android setup.
WD-42
Every time I see this I think "cool! I can run some cool Android app that doesn't have a Linux counterpart" and every time I fail to think of anything. Are there any must have Android apps out there?
jraph
Organic Maps and OSMAnd. They are better than open source desktop map software I could find.
Organic Maps has a desktop linux version but it's far from having feature parity.
Although it might change with this grant [1] aiming to build a nice desktop UI for Organic Maps.
sureglymop
I love FairEmail, the mail client. Crazy to say this but it may be better than all the desktop mail clients I have used.
bsdice
I tried them all (also anything on Linux) and now I just use Roundcube on a local install, which runs in any browser.
eigenspace
The main thing for me would be stuff like banking which require app-based authentication. Of course, solutions like this unfortunately don't work on something like Waydroid because the app knows it's in a container and thus blocks functionality.
bowbe
I mostly see this recommended for people who want to play mobile games on a Steam Deck.
prmoustache
But are there still mobile games worth playing when you have access to steam?
bobthecowboy
Somewhat weirdly, if you want to play Minecraft Bedrock (not the classic Java version, but the one developed for handhelds, consoles, and Windows) on the SteamDeck this appears to be the most solid path. I've played it and it works.
razemio
TFT from Riot Games would be a good example. Protected by Vanguard so you can not use wine. However you need an arm device, since they do not publish apks for x86.
alias_neo
I use it for this; found out about it when I installed Bazzite on my ROG Ally and it came with Waydroid.
The other useful feature for me is using the Android apps for media subscriptions that only enable offline downloads in the app and not in the browser so I can use them on the go.
WD-42
Ahhh, that actually makes a lot of sense. I didn't even think of games. Maybe I'll use it to play Candy Crush.
saghm
Isn't there already a PC version of that? It always seems to be pinned to the Start menu of new Windows installations, but maybe that's also via some sort of Android compatibility layer
Perenti
I have a "smart guitar" that needs the app to change settings. It's the only thing keeping me on a "smart" phone.
seabass-labrax
By 'smart guitar', do you mean that the guitar has an amplifier or effect pedal built-in?
mihalycsaba
Screen record apps, that are protected in a normal phone.
MiddleEndian
For me it seems useful for the opposite reason. There's a lot of garbage that you have to use where something could be a website but they want you to install some Android app. If I could run those Android apps on my PC, maybe it could be a slightly less terrible experience. Perhaps various dating apps as well, idk.
ollybee
Exactly the same for me. I now just use and old android phone with a broken screen and run scrcpy
Demiurge
Does this allow the container access a hardware USB device? I have Mooondrop FreeDSP usb-c cable with an PEQ that only works with a terrible Android app, and it takes forever to change the EQ settings via an Android tablet I have, that has terrible touch screen. I wish I could just use my linux laptop to do it.
jeroenhd
I think it does, to the point where plugging in USB devices while Android has focus accidentally captures the USB device: https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid/issues/778
If not, it's just a Linux container, so with some udev rules you should be able to make it work regardless.
tgtweak
A few things that seem like they're consistently missing from these projects: Hardware 3d acceleration from the host in a version of OpenGL ES + Vulkan that most phones have natively. Lastly, many apps have built-in ways of detecting that they're not running on a phone and ditch out (looking at cpuinfo and referencing that with the purported device being run).
It also seems that expected arm support on device is increasing (along with expected throughput) and that the capability of the x86 host device you need to emulate even a modest modern mobile ARM soc is getting higher and higher.
Lastly, the android version supported is almost always 3-4 generations behind the current Android. Apps are quick to drop legacy android support or run with fewer features/less optimizations on older versions of the OS. The android base version in this project is from 2020.
Anecdotally, using bluestacks (which indisputably has the most compatible and optimized emulation stack in the entire space) with a 7800X3D / RTX 3090 still runs most games slower than a snapdragon 8 phone from yesteryear running natively.
westurner
virtio-gpu rutabaga was recently added to QEMU IIUC mostly by Google for Chromebook Android emulation or Android Studio or both?
virtio-gpu-rutabaga: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/devices/virtio-gpu.h...
Rutabaga Virtual Graphics Interface: https://crosvm.dev/book/appendix/rutabaga_gfx.html
gfxstream: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/hardware/google/gf...
"Gfxstream Merged Into Mesa For Vulkan Virtualization" (2024-09) https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Gfxstream-Merged
I don't understand why there is not an official x86 container / ROM for Android development? Do CI builds of Android apps not run tests with recent versions of Android? How do CI builds of APKs run GUI tests without an Android container?
tgtweak
There is no official support for x86 in android any more - the Android-x86 project was the last I know that supported/maintained it. Last release was 2022.
For apps that use Vulkan natively, it's easy - but many still use and rely on OpenGL ES. It's a weird scenario where you have apps that are now supporting Vulkan, but they have higher minimum OS requirements as a result... but those versions of Android aren't supported by these type of projects.
sweeter
What Im surprised about is that no one has abstracted this out so you can run multiple Android containers under LXC. With Waydroid, you have one image. From what I can see they use a custom Linux kernel with a lot of patches and I wasn't really able to get a handle on it, but the LXC interface stuff is pretty simple.
bean-weevil
Waydroid uses the host kernel.
pizzalife
Since Binder is a kernel feature, how do they get it to work?
refulgentis
written 6 years ago: "The binder kernel driver has been present in the upstream Linux kernel for quite a while now."
jeroenhd
While it's part of upstream Linux, many kernels come with it disabled because it has a long history of security issues and basically nothing but Android uses it.
It also liked to trigger kernel panics for me on Ubuntu 22.04, but that could be a weird hardware issue.
refulgentis
Ah, interesting...man, software is fun. I wouldn't have guessed in a million years that it could cause panics as an optional component, like, it shouldn't be running code unless it is being used, and it shouldn't be called because it isn't mandatory in the kernel.
I guess I'm still grokking software complexity, Linux, and how much work an OS is truly is, 25 years after I built my first Linux box...because in another sense, of course that could happen.
Muromec
What does this binder thing even do? I get it's an IPC something, but why does android need it's own special kernel-level IPC?
teraflop
There's some general information about it here: https://elinux.org/Android_Binder
A binder transaction behaves sort of like a syscall, in the sense that a client process can immediately, synchronously transfer control to a server thread, rather than just enqueueing a message to be processed whenever the server gets around to it.
This enables Android to separate many of its components into different processes (at different privilege levels), and use binder for RPCs that are on the "critical path" for user interaction, without incurring impractical amounts of overhead or latency.
esprehn
Wikipedia has a good explanation of Binder and the history which goes way back to Be OS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBinder
It's more like a micro services framework that abstracts threads and processes.
Fuchsia takes the approach to the conclusion and powers the entire OS through a similar system:
homebrewer
You're expected to install a kernel that has the module, or build it yourself. I use linux-zen which ships binder out of the box.
yonatan8070
Accrding to the Arch Wiki, it uses the kernel modules. Have a look at section 1.4 here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Waydroid
buyucu
Binder has been on the mainline Linux kernel for a long long time.
WhyNotHugo
Your host kernel needs to have binderfs.
tuananh
easiest way is to use zen kernel because it's already baked in.
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Surprised to see this on the frontpage - it's a well known piece of software.
It's unfortunate that there are no Google-vended images (e.g. the generic system image) that run on Waydroid. Typing my password into random ROMs from the internet sketches me out.
https://source.android.com/docs/core/tests/vts/gsi