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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

> The PinePhone will likely be preferable to most LineageOS phones

IMO an android app runtme would be essential for any of these efforts to be comparable to Lineage. Anybody working on that?

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Anbox is a compatibility later that runs Android apps on other Linux distributions. It's not stable yet, but there has been some interest in adding Anbox to mobile Linux distributions like UBports and LuneOS.

https://anbox.io

https://github.com/anbox/anbox

I doubt that this would be nearly as useful as you think since so many apps are dependent on Google services these days and even the client libraries for them are proprietary. And then there's the fact that you're constantly playing catch up with what is effectively a closed platform with no real public roadmap that throws the occasional source drop over the wall and says 'good luck!'

It's unlikely today's Google is going to be interested in seeing these efforts succeed. So an Android app runtime would likely only really run software from 5+ years ago well. Better to focus on making a really solid Linux mobile experience, IMO.

How do you know how useful I think it will be and in what ways?

F-Droid exists. People installing APKs exist. In some cases these options are better than literal nothing, and especially if momentum builds around these it's possible that app developers may notice.

For lineage, it is popular to install Google Play anyway. I guess that to be a copyright violation that Google looks the other way for and if a real world competitor did this they would crack down.

There's also microG for some of those proprietary google services.

Yes, but they are not working hard. Even if they had the runtime, they won't have apps because google won't give the access to the play store, so what is the point of the runtime?

I've seen 3 projects working on the runtime (in 3 different ways with different pros/cons).

There are over 6,000 apps on F-Droid that don't use Google Play Services, and some of them are certain to be useful to Linux phone users.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/tree/master/metadata

There's also microG that aims to implement google services while being open source.

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