#linux #android #emulators #googleplay #genymotion #waydroid #anbox
Hey everyone! 👋 So, I’ve been pondering about something and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Why do you think android apps are not natively supported on linux, even though android is based on linux? 🤔
I recently noticed that genymotion, which is a cross platform android emulator, runs just as fast on windows as it does on linux. But when it comes to other emulators like waydroid or anbox, the performance on linux seems to fall short compared to Windows emulators.
Here are a few things I’m thinking about:
– If android is built on linux, why the disparity in performance?
– Why do Windows emulators seem to have better performance, like google play pc edition running games as if they were native windows games?
Do you have any ideas on how we can improve this situation and make android apps run smoother on linux? Let’s brainstorm together! 💡🤗
The Android kernel is the Linux kernel, and Linux distro running on a PC also uses the Linux kernel. But that’s where the similarities largely end. The rest of the OS is very different. A much bigger problem is the difference in hardware architecture and CPU though. PCs are Intel based while Android runs on ARM. That means that Android apps cannot natively run on a PC even if the OS was identical.
As others have said Android is much different from a Linux distro and most of the apps are compiled for arm and not for AMD64 CPU arch that Intel and AMD PCs use. The only way to run android on a Linux platform is an emulator. Some could argue that highly motivated Linux dev. could optimize this emulator on a Linux machine to utilize some Linux only features to make it run Android apps faster. However that is probably too hard and not worth it.
For the same reason you can’t actually be a Monkey’s Uncle.
The two platforms have a common ancestor, yes, but they’ve since diverged too far for app compatibility.
Even Mac and pc trace back to a common ancestor, if you go back far enough.
Android is Linux but Linux is not android