
Anbox – A container-based approach to boot full Android on a regular Linux - homarp
https://github.com/anbox/anbox
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crankylinuxuser
Hmm. That's really handy at dealing with "download and use app to save %"

Sure. I'll make a VM, do the bullshit app, and pop the vm.

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mehrdadn
If there's no virtualization though then you'd need to find an x86 copy of the
app right?

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opencl
Most Android apps are just JVM bytecode and work on any architecture. Apps
using the NDK (native development kit) are architecture-specific and often
lack x86 binaries but ecommerce apps are highly unlikely to use the NDK.

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mehrdadn
Huh, I feel like I used to get tons of "app X wants to load binary Y.so"
notifications with XPrivacy for quite a few apps... is it really that rare?

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opencl
I wouldn't call it rare in general, but it seems pretty rare within the
specific genre of ecommerce apps. Unless they use React Native, that requires
the NDK.

I have an x86 Android tablet and it does emulate ARM binaries but the
performance is bad enough that it is pretty obvious when you are running ARM
binaries. I'm not sure how hard it would be to integrate libhoudini (Intel's
ARM emulator) into this, if they ever even released the code.

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GranPC
Unfortunately libhoudini is proprietary. I don't think it's being updated for
newer Android versions either.

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zanedb
Anbox is a great idea but it needs a lot of work to become a usable project.
Currently, it's only available on a few distros, and app installation
instructions are nowhere to be found.

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neilsimp1
> and app installation instructions are nowhere to be found

[https://github.com/anbox/anbox/blob/master/docs/install.md](https://github.com/anbox/anbox/blob/master/docs/install.md)
??

Or do you mean for installing Android apps?

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plussed_reader
What else would you install after putting Anbox into your setup?

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snaky
F-Droid.

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richdougherty
I'd love it if I could have both handset and server Android devices and they
could talk to each other. Imagine running the server-side part of apps (e.g.
always on, attached storage) on a bit of cloud that you own yourself.

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LeoPanthera
Why does it matter what the backend OS is? Why does it need to be Android?

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derefr
I think the idea here is that you would compile one native Android application
that is running a single “distributed process” capable of spawning threads in
both places, as if the phone and the cloud were two (very distant) NUMA noses
of the same physical device. (Or, more practically, with the Android runtime
doing transparent distributed RPC using a single set of static types that are
marshalled between the client and server using something like protobufs.)

For this to work out, the devices really need to be either capable of running
the same native code; or at least need to all be running an abstract bytecode
VM with its durable state synchronized between them.

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enjeru
Has anyone tried running the Slack Android app with this? I am wondering if it
would work better than the Electron based one available on desktop.

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rasengan
This is amazing. Great job!

