I used to hate android emulators, since the ones I’d tested on Windows were ad-ridden, slow bloatware.
The other day I needed to run an android app on Fedora 40.
I tried Waydroid and it worked very well. The app ran supersmooth as if it was running natively.
Also the cli syntax was very sane an user friendly.
waydroid app install|run|list …
So if you need an Android app on linux the experience might be better than what you think it would be.
Wouldn’t some Android Apps require specific builds for x86 architectures? Does Android take care of that?
If you need arm, then you probably have to install libhoudini https://github.com/casualsnek/waydroid_script
libhoudini is optimized for Intel, NDK for AMD, but some apps may be incompatible with one or the other.
most android apps are architecure agnostic “java, kotlin etc” and even apps that are often ship “Universal binaries” which include x86, or split builds for arm and x86
A lot of android apps are built using Java/Kotlin, so you don’t actually need to care about architecture since the JVM supports both x86_64 and arm64.
There are exceptions to this though, since some apps need to run native code. Those apps would need some sort of emulation/translation layer for the arm instructions.