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The Dream of Android Apps on Linux Phones Is So Close to Coming True

Anbox now supports some Android apps on postmarketOS

Mar 25, 2020 08:13 GMT  ·  By
postmarketOS now runs Anbox in an experimental stage
   postmarketOS now runs Anbox in an experimental stage

The Linux phone market is still a very limited one, but there’s no doubt there’s a lot of potential here, and with the necessary improvements, it can very well become a worthy solution for power users.

And thanks to a recent achievement, using a Linux phone could become less painful, as the developers of postmarketOS have completed work on a key feature to get Anbox up and running.

Also known as Android in a Box, Anbox is now capable of running some Android apps on Linux phones thanks to a container-based solution, technically opening the door for further improvements in this regard.

What this means is that more apps could soon be supported on postmarketOS, especially if the development of this new feature advances as planned.

Known issues

As noted by TuxPhones, Anbox support isn’t something that happened overnight. In fact, support for Android in a Box is something that was originally explored nearly two years ago, and only recently the development team marked it as “solved.”

For the time being, Anbox on Linux phones is still in experimental stage, which means that not everything is working exactly as planned, albeit it’s most likely just a matter of time until everything is resolved.

What you need to know at this point is that Anbox runs on Android 7.1.1 Nougat, so apps that require newer versions of Android may not work. Furthermore, the current implementation lacks Google Play support and Google Play Services, so you may need to turn to more complex tricks to get around this limitation.

And of course, not everything is very responsive, so some sort of lag is expected, as seen in the PinePhone demo embedded at the end of the article. The good news is that the first steps have already been made, and now it’s certainly only a matter of time until Android apps end up running more smoothly on Linux phones.