README

IMPORTANT - Hi there 👋


The Anbox project was once ago created in 2017 to bring Android to any Linux based desktop operating system. It's development has however stalled in the past years and it's only fair to say that now in 2023 it's no longer actively developed.

In the past years new alternatives have came up which are carrying the same idea of a containerized Android forward:

If you're looking for a solution to run Android on your Linux desktop:

 Waydroid is rebuilding the original idea behind Anbox with explicit focus on modern Wayland powered desktop environments.

If you're looking for a solution to run Android in the cloud:

 Anbox Cloud as a solution developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, to bring Android at scale to any cloud with support for ultra low latency video streaming and recent Android versions.

The existing repositories will remain as is but no active maintence will be applied going forward.

Thank you all for your support!

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 Anbox

Anbox is a container-based approach to boot a full Android system on a
regular GNU/Linux system like Ubuntu. In other words: Anbox will let
you run Android on your Linux system without the slowness of
virtualization.

 Overview

Anbox uses Linux namespaces (user, pid, uts, net, mount, ipc) to run a
full Android system in a container and provide Android applications on
any GNU/Linux-based platform.

The Android inside the container has no direct access to any hardware.
All hardware access is going through the anbox daemon on the host. We're
reusing what Android implemented within the QEMU-based emulator for OpenGL
ES accelerated rendering. The Android system inside the container uses
different pipes to communicate with the host system and sends all hardware
access commands through these.

For more details have a look at the following documentation pages:

  Android Hardware OpenGL ES emulation design overview
  Android QEMU fast pipes
  The Android "qemud" multiplexing daemon
  Android qemud services

Anbox is currently suited for the desktop use case but can be used on mobile
operating systems like Ubuntu Touch or
postmarketOS
(installation instructions).
However this is still a work in progress.

The Android runtime environment ships with a minimal customized Android system
image based on the Android Open Source Project.
The used image is currently based on Android 7.1.1

 Installation

See our installation instructions for details.

 Supported Linux Distributions

At the moment we officially support the following Linux distributions:

  Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic)
  Ubuntu 20.04 (focal)

However all other distributions supporting snap packages should work as
well as long as they provide the mandatory kernel support (see documentation).

 Install and Run Android Applications

You can install Android applications from the command line using adb.

sh
adb install xyz.apk


The apk files you will sometimes find on the internet tend to only have arm
support, and will therefore not work