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Comment by justaguy88 | Hacker News Reader

Why can't linux run android apps? https://anbox.io/ exists, I'm sure it could become a more integrated thing on a linux phone

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Yes, Anbox exists, and has done some amazing things. But can this run apps that require Google Play Services, such as WhatsApp, most banking apps, and governmental apps?

It is very unfortunate that so much of the Android ecosystem relies on a very proprietary and cloud-connected piece of software. Without it, most apps simply refuse to work. MicroG has done amazing things here, but unfortunately a lot of things still break when using it, to no fault of the MicroG developers.

WhatsApp doesn't actually require Google Play Services, as everyone running LineageOS can tell you. Even if you don’t have Play Services and the Google Play Store, you can install Whatsapp from Aurora Store (off F-Droid) and then Whatsapp runs just fine on your vanilla Android.

Okay, but what about the apps that do? Some governments and banks require you to use their apps to get certain things done.

Currently the only option is to either help with the efforts to run and emulate Google Play Services or switch to a different bank - much like requiring in-person visitors wear a mask, they're legally allowed to require you to use certain software or certain mechanisms to access your bank account.

> help with the efforts to run and emulate Google Play Services

Modern bank apps require not just Google Play Services, they also require the phone to pass Safety Net. Play Services substitutes like MicroG aren’t capable of that.

This is a classic scenario that Linux also faced. Some people might be too young to remember, but a lot of services used to rely on Internet Explorer 6- and ActiveX when there was no chance whatsoever of getting those running properly on Linux. Later we had issues with DRM for streaming sites, which have probably not been fully solved yet.

The truth is that service and app developers only care about one thing: audience size, which translates to actual money. And it takes a long time to build that audience, even more so in the mobile world where all metrics are orders of magnitude bigger than on the desktop. Until Linux phones can show they have sizeable audiences, developers will ignore them. Tens of thousands is nothing, we’ll need millions. Realistically, this is not going to change in 12 months or even 2 years.

But, something can be done in the meantime: making all popular app-development frameworks run on mobile Linux, and then putting pressure on developers to produce app builds. When portability comes essentially for free, it becomes easy to support an additional platform just for the brownie points.

Yes, in fact here is a video of a pinephone running WhatsApp using Anbox: https://youtu.be/Y-9Wmki7DsU?t=2007

download the apk from https://www.whatsapp.com/android/, start anbox (this takes a while), install android-tools, adb install WhatsApp.apk, done. It also works with stuff like Duo Mobile, which is the 2FA my organization uses (which is interesting because it doesn't agree with my rooted lineageOS phone).

Anbox comes by default on current versions of Manjaro

Let's not pretend that Anbox is some kind of magical drop in solution. I tried it many times and it's completely hit-and-miss at this stage, and development is very slow. Relying on Anbox for the future would be foolish unless someone steps in to massively increase the funding and resources on this project.

Some distros on the pinephone can run android apps with anbox!

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