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One of the major advantages of Waydroid that I've found is that it's lighter than Anbox. I know some here have compute to spare, but it makes a big difference on my Pinephone :)

It's still early days for Waydroid, but it's also decidedly a step forwards.

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Wait - you can run waydroid, and thus presumably Android apps, on Pinephone? This is huge! How well does it work?

The PinePhone runs mainline Linux on a regular Arm64 SOC. Why shouldn’t it work? ;)

Because you're running an emulator on a damnd phone!! A PHONE! Wild!

Phones have more processing power than laptops from just a few years ago. People aren't exaggerating when they call them pocket supercomputers.

The series 7 Apple Watch has a higher resolution display than the original iPhone.

The PinePhone processor and GPU are pathetic. It's not the phone people mean when they say phones are comparable in power to laptops.

Up thread some person is running and emulator/container with some not-lightweight software in it! On the Pine! Maybe "pathetic" is not the right word. It's more powerful than my first laptop (I think the comparison there is phones-now to laptops-back-then)

> Performance is quite comparable to Anbox on the same device.

I had a PinePhone. The performance of Anbox on it was slow, and apps were rendered at a low resolution and scaled up using bilinear scaling. And I had to configure zram/zswap (which was a good idea regardless of using Anbox or not), because otherwise the 1 gigabyte of RAM wasn't enough to fit Linux and Anbox, and Anbox would terminate from merely poking around in the settings app and trying to login to MicroG or something.

I hope that the scaling (and performance?) is fixed in Anbox, and that Waydroid performs faster than Anbox and uses less RAM. But I no longer have a functioning PinePhone to test further on.

I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG0uAQqeqW4. Scrolling through the recent apps list has both a high latency and low frame rate (and PinePhone-native UIs like GTK Phosh and Plasma Mobile are not really better). And the gameplay had 150 or more milliseconds of latency between touch input and the screen responding, which is awful.

> It's more powerful than my first laptop

This speaks to how unoptimized and GPU-dependent today's software is (Xfce on a dual-core ULV Intel-based laptop from 2016 is more responsive than KDE Plasma on that laptop or a Zen 3 desktop PC, admittedly with a crappy GPU), and perhaps how today's screens are higher-resolution than old laptops.

> I think the comparison there is phones-now to laptops-back-then

The comparison is with "laptops from just a few years ago". My old laptop runs circles around my PinePhone, though I won't say it's better than good phones of today.

Most phones don't have iPhone class CPUs.

Well it is a container rather than an emulator. Maybe some parts are emulated, like opengl, but I believe waydroid is a lot "closer to the metal" than anbox is.

so is there any virtualization or not? what kind of container technology is this?

Lxc iirc.

The SoC is pretty slow. speaking as a PinePhone owner.

If you think that Pinephone is slow, try a less cluttered OS (https://sxmo.org), or consider Librem 5 instead.

...or wait for the fxtec to ship. If I'm going to have a command line on my phone, I want a keyboard.

> If I'm going to have a command line on my phone, I want a keyboard.

https://pineguild.com/pinephone-keyboard-first-impression-is...

Also, you can connect via ssh and use your computer's keyboard to manage the phone. Or buy a Bluetooth keyboard.

The fxtec looks neat in theory, but one thing I love on my PinePhone is its ability to just boot any OS on any SD-card you insert.

Do you know if the fxtec will offer the same? For a tinkerable Linux phone where you genuinely go distro-hopping, that's truly a game-changer.

I don't - all I know is that the bootloader is unlocked and it has a few recommended options. Agree with you that it's neat in theory, but am waiting for the first reviews before I plunk down cash.

You mean any OS that has been painstakingly ported and compiled for the Pinephone? I don't think that leaves you with a plethora of options...

I mean as opposed to having to use weird key-combos, special reset-modes, and arcane tools to flash/erase internal storage and re-install my phone every time I want to try something new.

With the PinePhone I can boot from external media (like SD-cards), and that's quite a big deal.

Yeah, it's not ACPI and UEFI and generic images running HW-discovery and magically "just working", but it's still way better than the options you have pretty most everywhere else in phone-space.

Looks a lot like the planet Astro Slide but with a worse keyboard?

Sure. I have one too. I know.

But that’s no reason for it not to work, it will just work more slowly ;)

I've asked about anbox (not having heard of waydroid before now) on Pinephone threads before, consensus seemed to be even without bugs it's too slow on Pinephone hardware. (And indeed I've found it too buggy to be useful on my desktop anyway.)

So certainly lighter sounds good, and hopefully the future's bright - could be very useful in bridging the gap driving more Linux phone adoption. Some things just can't and won't be available (without way more adoption), like bank apps say, so being able to run the Android version smoothly would be a huge win.

Quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG0uAQqeqW4

Here is on a OnePlus 6T running postmarketOS, for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9qaD5YIPkc

Can you add a bit more on what works and what doesn't work on waydroid compared with regular android and regular lineageos on pine phone.

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