Android apps on Linux with Waydroid
It is not uncommon for users to want to run a program targeted to one operating system on another type of system. With the increasing prevalence of smartphones, Android has become the world's most widely used operating system. So users may want to run Android apps on Linux systems in order to get access to a game or other app that is not available in a Linux version or to develop mobile apps on their desktop system. The Waydroid project provides a way to run those apps on Linux, which means they can run on a variety of devices, including Linux-based smartphones like the PinePhone.
Waydroid is similar in concept to the Windows compatibility layer Wine. The fact that Android runs on the Linux kernel makes properly running Android apps on other Linux systems much simpler than doing so for Windows software. It is not possible to simply run Android apps directly on a regular Linux operating system, though, because they depend on a different user-space environment. However, by using kernel features such as namespaces, it is possible to run the entire Android user space in a container on a Linux system. This is the technique used by Waydroid; it runs a complete Android system in a container in much the same way that it is possible to, for example, run Debian in a container on Fedora. That allows Waydroid to have better performance than it would have running in a virtual machine or an emulator.
