Google slips built-in terminal, Debian Linux VM into Android 15 March feature drop
Quoting: Google slips built-in Linux terminal into Android 15 update —
The March "feature drop" for Android 15 on Google Pixel devices includes an optional Linux session.
Although Google's description of the March 2025 Pixel Drop doesn't even mention it, Android Authority noticed. The functionality has been in development for a while, as the site reported in October, and is now available as a stable app for mainstream Android 15 Pixel users.
That said, the new feature is an optional extra that users can turn on by enabling the Linux development environment that appears under the developer options in the system settings, which indicates its expected audience. It's not a terminal emulator that lets you access Android's underlying native Linux environment. Instead, this is a special Debian VM, running on top of the built-in Android Virtualization Framework.
To the Reg FOSS desk, this sounds very similar to the built-in Linux Terminal that's available in ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex.