What’s New?
So I was recently browsing the hacker news platform and there I found out some new exciting stuff. The most exciting thing to me that I found was the new WayDroid.
This takes a new approach to bring the Android System to the linux using containerization. The current used image is currently based on Android 11.
You can add gapps if you want. That’s a plus for me as it doesn’t come with a pre installed Gapps. A plus for security and privacy.
For installing apps, you can either use F-Droid or can diretly install apks from third party websites. Waydroid provides a good CLI interface for interacting with the the android system and do things like installing apps and stuff. It comes to me as a better version of Windows Subsytem for Android, which is still half baked, restricted and privacy invading solution for running Android Apps on your PC. WayDroid should provide a reason for native android developers and users to switch to Linux based OS.
What’s Best?
Honestly, for me the best part is, “OPEN SOURCE”. The waydroid project is opensource, built and driven by the community.
What’s the benefit of Open Source?
Well, we can expect faster bug fixes and faster developement cycle with new features coming up sooner. Right now, WSA (Windows Subsystem for Android) is at Android 13 Beta and WayDroid is running Android 11 stable. So I can expect it will soon upgrade to Android 12.
What’s not supported yet?
The thing that I feel that should be important and isn’t supported yet is NVIDIA GPU support. Right now, the WayDroid is supporting Intel/AMD GPU which is due to the easy driver support for both the platforms, but NVIDIA is notoriously famous for not giving GPU support for open source projects for a long time. I hope this gets fixed soon.
Other than this, I feel the users should soon get the ability to install custom OS on the WayDroid. As of now only LineageOS is supported.
Conclusion
Overall, I really liked this project and would love to follow up on this. Right now it’s very much useable for everything that a general user needs it for.
I love it!