Anbox Is A New Way To Run Android Apps On A Linux Desktop
While there was the KDE-aligned Shashlik effort for trying to get Android apps running on the Linux desktop, Anbox is a new initiative made public this week by a Canonical developer for running Android programs on the Linux desktop.
Simon Fels is a Lead Software Engineer at Canonical working on Ubuntu Core while it seems his side project for the past year and a half has been creating Anbox. Anbox is short for "Android in a Box" and is a fully open-source (GPLv3 and then Apache 2.0 in needed areas) way for getting Android applications on the Linux desktop.
Anbox makes use of LXC for having an Android container and bridges needed functionality to the Linux desktop. Linux namespaces are used for isolation. OpenGL ES support is achieved by re-using Android emulator code for serializing the command stream and shipping them off to the host's OpenGL / GLES drivers. So it's not the emulator approach seen by other Android-on-the-desktop approaches, but requires extra crafting to get right. Anbox in its current state is considered pre-alpha.
More details via Simon's blog or by visiting anbox.io. Anbox is distributed in binary form via Snaps and this does seem to work on Ubuntu, but doesn't appear to be an official Ubuntu/Canonical project.
Simon Fels is a Lead Software Engineer at Canonical working on Ubuntu Core while it seems his side project for the past year and a half has been creating Anbox. Anbox is short for "Android in a Box" and is a fully open-source (GPLv3 and then Apache 2.0 in needed areas) way for getting Android applications on the Linux desktop.
Anbox makes use of LXC for having an Android container and bridges needed functionality to the Linux desktop. Linux namespaces are used for isolation. OpenGL ES support is achieved by re-using Android emulator code for serializing the command stream and shipping them off to the host's OpenGL / GLES drivers. So it's not the emulator approach seen by other Android-on-the-desktop approaches, but requires extra crafting to get right. Anbox in its current state is considered pre-alpha.
More details via Simon's blog or by visiting anbox.io. Anbox is distributed in binary form via Snaps and this does seem to work on Ubuntu, but doesn't appear to be an official Ubuntu/Canonical project.
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