It's waydroid on linux.
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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Yes. Waydroid is very nice. What do you use it for? I've come to the realization I don't really need a lot of Android apps on my laptop, I have good Linux software for 99.9% of the stuff I do. So Waydroid mostly sits there, unused, while I use a regular Linux messenger client and Google Maps on the website.
I use it exclusively to control my a/c's thermostats as an ios or android app is the only way to do it remotely.
I confess I haven't used it but I've been wanting to try and get my preferred RSS reader app (Feeder) on my computer - that's the only one that I want though
So, if you had a linux phone, you could still run all android apps as is? Given you have an .apk I suppose?
If you can get the app. I looked at Waydroid and other apps, but discovered that app I needed was only on the google play store. (I want to see when my kid's bus will arrive - there is no web site, just an app. I suspect it needs google logins or something to use, but I gave up before I figured out how to download the .apk)
You can use Aurora Store, it's an open source client for the play store. Just probably don't sign into it with your real google account since it violates the play store tos
That would be easy on a linux phone setup where you have no need to sign in.
Yeah, only time it becomes inconvenient is if you want to use a paid app
For the future, apkmirror.com is the easy answer for your needs
No, the architecture still needs to match. If you android app supports x86, you're good. Otherwise, you can technically emulate ARM64 and run it, but the performance will suck ass.
Would it work on Windows using WSL?
I don't think it will. If it does you will need to jump through a ton of hoops to get it working. I remember when I tried to set It up on WSL i had to manually set up anbox binders, and start dbus up every time. Even after that there were errors preventing me from doing anything beyond downloading the image.
"Yo, Dawg. I heard you like subsystems..."
Is cygwin still around?
Yes but you don't need it. WSL2 comes with WSLg these days, and can draw to your Windows desktop without an external graphical server.
i have no need, so i haven't bothered with trying.. but i have seen pages by people who have gotten it to run--with some extra work involved.
Would your pc work if you moved to linux?
Doesn't Waydroid require Wayland instead of XWindows?
Because my Linux PC is also my gaming PC, which for historical reasons (used to be a Windows PC) has a NVidia card, and from what I've read Wayland is a lot more problematic with NVidia drivers than XWindows.
Last time I went to install Waydroid I just stopped half way and reverted it because their website says it requires Wayland.
For the past few months I've used Wayland with Bazzite and Nvidia, with no apparent issue. I might have issues or missing features I don't realize, and if there was a performance degradation it was small enough I didn't notice.
Tldr; YMMV, but works for me
I'm on Pop!OS which comes with X11 by default, so I'm very wary of trying to change it to use Wayland as I don't wan't to risk breaking my gaming PC (followed by who knows how many days of mucking about with it to fix it) which is supposed to just be for coming home after work and relaxing.
Is there another way of running Android apps on Linux?
Flatpak or?
i use x11 and i run weston on top of x11 and waydroid inside it. seems to work fine
Interesting.
I'm having a look at documentation about it and weston does indeed seem like a pretty straightforward way of having a Wayland compositor on top of X11 (or per the documentation, on top of pretty much anything) to run applications that expect such a compositor, like Waydroid.
I think I might give that a try.
Thanks.
Over the last year or so NVIDIA massively improved their Wayland support. May not be perfect, may not be as good as AMD, but it usually cones with lass drawbacks than the X11 experience.
So, basically that article has been written with the purpose to show their users the BlueStacks sponsorship, while bashing on slow and clunky emulators like BlueStacks 😂