I tried Waydroid on Arch and its amazing. It runs Android apps flawlessly. And with a touchscreen device, I feel like I have an Android tablet running inside my Linux machine.
But I still don’t know what to use it for…
What apps do you use with Waydroid? What use cases do you have for it?
Android does have lots of games, and some apps that aren’t as easy to use, or as good as in native linux. For example, some painting apps (krita is powerful, but can also overwhelm someone), video editors like capcut or lumafusion, audio apps. For most of everything else, there is a web browser on linux that can do the job better probably, and native apps. But overall, I’d say that Android apps aren’t really that useful on linux, because they’re mostly geared towards apps that you use on the go, while you usually sitting on a chair at home or work when you’re using linux. To be honest, most native apps now have been replaced by a web browser, so either native linux or native android apps are only useful for high end professional usages (e.g. blender, video editing, etc) rather than everyday use.
aren’t a lot of games aarch64 only? do they even support x86? I’ve attempted in the past to use waydroid for a game, but no way to install it on an x86 machine. Does waydroid support some kind of box64 layer?
There is an unofficial script that ads arm emulation. Note before anyone asks, it will not become officially supported by waydroid.
Only the ones that are written in compiling language. The ones written in java/cotlin can. Also, in x86 tablets there are special chips that have arm emulation in hardware for these compiled apps. But plain x86 desktop cpus don’t have that. So it depends what app can work and what can’t.