Comment by tgtweak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgtweak | Hacker News Reader

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What's different between this and anbox (other than support, focus, etc)?

How good is the 3d support, ie: Does it support a modern version of OpenGL ES? Can it process that via host hardware support (a la angle or similar)? Can it do that headlessly without an window server running on the host? Can the video output of the app be easily captured by nvenc or intel/amd equivalent?

Is arm translation supported natively or does it require plugins for the abi translation?

Are google's libraries (play services, play store, webview) or alternatives easy to install/supported?

Can the app data and system volume be mounted externally?

Can the system details (cpuid/flags, device name/mfg/model, android OS specifics) be provided/spoofed?

Can sensor inputs (gps location, tilt, multi-touch gestures, battery level, network status, camera/s) be easily simulated or passed from host sensor to the guest app? Can bluetooth be passed through from the host?

Would love for somebody to crush this space and not pivot immediately into commercial offering.

- 3D support is using Mesa, so full GL accelleration on supported hardware (sorry nVidia, your Open-Source game sucks)

- Arm translation is on the radar, and we have solutions in the works. Just nothing ready for the masses yet.

- No Google Play Services as of yet. Some of our builds do use MicroG, Aurora Store, and other FOSS apps & open-source GMS options.

- It uses LXC, so yes, you can mount whatever is needed, we just don't have an exemplary (easy) way to do it yet.

- We are using hardware passthroughs via binder, so eventually Waydroid (Android side) will be able to access the system details available to it. Same with sensor inputs.

- We would all love to get paid, doing what we enjoy. But for this project, we are not even collecting donations yet. Money isn't what is driving this project. That's not saying that collecting donations and sponsorships aren't on our radar, just that it's not a primary focus. Open-Innovation is.

Awesome, very excited and will be following the project. Let me know when you have a donate button - or if you need testbeds.

We are working on growing our testers from just us, to a few capable users out there currently. Hit us up on Telegram or Matrix and I will try to get that group started soon.

That's quite the shopping list

Real use cases/requirements.

Perhaps! My point was that it's quite a large order for the desired price of 0.

Those are just questions. I think the OP would accept the answers "no".

I mean sure he would accept the answer "no", but why even ask the questions in the first place?

That is like going to a used car lot, looking at a car with a tag price of 1000 dollars and asking is it electric, does it have doors that open like wings, does it have level 2 autonomous etc. Sure, you will take no for an answer, but why you be even asking that?

To me those questions are more like; Does it have wheels, do the wheels have tyres, does it have brakes, is it road legal?

Asking about the existence of such things is not a suggestion that they must be provided at that price. It's simply the baseline criteria for some people to want to use it.

>To me those questions are more like; Does it have wheels, do the wheels have tyres, does it have brakes, is it road legal?

Considering the availability of the demanded product at the respective price points, I think that my analogy is much more accurate than yours.

>Asking about the existence of such things is not a suggestion that they must be provided at that price.

Sure, it is up to you to choose what product you want. But you should still have some awareness about the price of that product in the market. If someone offers a car for 5$ on ebay, I am going to assume it is a toy, not the real thing.

> If someone offers a car for 5$ on ebay, I am going to assume it is a toy, not the real thing.

The whole point of the OP's questions is that they didn't want to assume anything! I don't see the harm in asking these types of questions, even if the most likely answer to each of them is "no".

I am not saying that the questions are outright harmful, just supporting another person's remark that "this comment reads really strangely".

There is no harm in asking whether the 1000$ car at the used car dealership comes with cars that open like wings either, but it would sound strange.

> What's different between this and anbox

I believe Waydroid was originally "anbox-halium"—a rewrite with LXC to get closer to the metal.

Why would anbox need lxc? For Ndk support? How good is it on waydroid?

LXC is needed to run the services that Android provides, for Android applications (Surfaceflinger, Audioflinger etc..)

Android ships with it's own init system that does a lot more than just starting/stopping services. And integrating those services manually into regular Linux desktop's init system would have been painful to say the least.

That's the reason Anbox runs the whole Android subsystem in it's own LXC container - to avoid having to patch the Android init system and various system libraries to load Android libraries from non AOSP paths. (Like /system/ , /vendor etc..)

From what i remember, The original Anbox used patched version of Android frameworks, that sent the application render data to the Anbox session manager running outside the container [1] , which then created the application windows and rendered it there. This was okay on desktop systems, but on mobile phones (Sailfish OS, Ubports devices) that were trying to use Anbox to provide app compatibility, this had a significant amount of overhead, that made it unusable.

Back then there was the sfdroid project, that tried to patch the Android frameworks running inside Anbox Container to directly create Wayland windows and render the applications directly (kind of like how Chrome OS used to do), instead of having the Anbox session manager do it [2,3], bringing back most of the lost performance.

From the looks of it, Waydroid seems to be doing something similar [4]

1. https://github.com/anbox/anbox/blob/master/docs/architecture... 2. https://github.com/sfdroid/anbox/ 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78N1C2-6t3I 4. https://github.com/waydroid/android_hardware_waydroid/blob/l...

Ahh, I think I was mistaken. I think Anbox already used LXC (which was good because it wasn't emulating the whole OS). The key difference that Waydroid brings is that it is written for Wayland. I guess this is an advantage over X because of how Wayland exposes device hardware.

> Can it process that via host hardware support (a la angle or similar)?

You don't need ANGLE for that, Mesa supports OpenGL ES natively.

I'm sorry if this is rude, but this comment reads really strangely. You seem to acknowledge that you really want something, whilst also accept you cannot do it for a lack of time|skill and then seem annoyed that the people who do ask for some kind of payment for their work?

I can understand how he ended up with that kind of accusatory tone. Existing solutions either come with severe compatibility issues(official Emulator, QEMU, etc.), or vaporwares with great demos(Project Astoria) or are really sketchy borderline malwares(rest of it - my presumptions) that does wonders.

Not just borderline. Most of the ones that can feasibly run a game for example are basically real malware.

Do you mind elaborating on this? Is it just because the use case turns into something like app install fraud?

It's everything from a mix of cryptominers being deployed quietly (since of course anyone installing these will have a low end or better GPU), app install fraud, review fraud, Play token theft, spyware-tier telemetry. Even on the ones that don't install anything bad at all, they tend to auto-install the lowest common denominator apps via advertisements or paid placement that then have their own absurdist SDKs or whatever for data collection and mining.

Pretty much any of the closed source emulators that can feasibly run games (i.e., be horribly abused en masse for botting games) are festering piles of crap.

Another super common thing in those low tier trash apps is using your computer as a proxy ala Hola. Pay-per-install for using you to run stolen card traffic.

I can run most games on the Android Studio emulator without much of an issue, though it takes a higher mid-tier system to do it.

Which games? I don't mean like Fruit Ninja or Candy Crush, but the games that people actively bot or abuse will have a ton of ridiculous bullshit (checking anti-root, safetynet, borderline malware or malware-esque SDKs that exfiltrate huge amounts of data)

You're right, probably nothing that would be the target of bots like that, so I don't know how well those would work.

I play a few games my kids got me addicted to, Williams Pinball, and miscellaneous niche games. They run fine. But I haven't tried some of the popular MMOs or games where farming is basically the point.

THis guy wants to run containers of Android games, such as the various Pay to Win Machine Zone games (they are just one example).

I played one of these once (some Final Fantasy thing) and the amount of manipulative social engineering, dopamine triggering sidegames, and manipulation by devs or employed super-players to "mix things up" to try to provoke people to fork over money was appalling.

Thankfully I used almost no money, I paid up for one or two things to see if they would be worth it (they weren't) before I could fully recognize the money extraction treadmill they were trying to get you one.

The games are a fascinating example of hyperinflation too.

> The games are a fascinating example of hyperinflation too.

Can you elaborate on what's fascinating?

Aside from the social engineering aspect of constantly undermining the value of "currency" such as "gold" or resources like "food", etc.

The game devs have complete control over the value of things be it buildings, soldiers, items, etc. The ability to constantly release new tiers/soldiers/etc that instantly devalue previous invested time and work all in service to wring more real-world money from addicts...

Of course once too many new shiny things are released, suddenly the climb/intro for new players is too high.

So suddenly, new players are given far more of the original "currency" of gold and resource to skip past the beginning steps so they can come within shouting distance to where investing money would keep them alive.

Well, it's kind of like a perverse fiat currency and a central government with the power to impose regulations and print currency at will.

The fact that the "central government" started printing money / resources once several more tiers of buildings/soldiers/defenses were introduced devalued all that previous investment and work to startling degrees.

To me it was reminiscent of fiat currency and hyperinflation due to printing money.

Just looking for the delta between this and anbox free/anbox cloud/genynotion cloud. No quams about paying for it honestly, just inquiring if any of these formerly paid-only (or build it yourself) features are being offered in the open here.

From what I understand this is aimed only at ARM, so there's no emulation. This is therefore targeting Linux phones, but not Linux on desktop (which is usually run on x86).

From what I saw on docs, it seemed to be agnostic to host linux architecture (x86 or arm host), but it did say (on the desktop guide):

> The apk files you will sometimes find on the internet tend to only have arm support, and will therefore not work on x86_64.

Suggesting that they don't provide cross-abi compatability. If/when they move to Android 11 as the underlying image - it has both x86 and arm translations built into the packaged abi. I suspect that it will be on the user to install any abi translation packages (libhoudini for example) in order to get arm apk's to run on x86 host without qemu.

That's one way to look at it. Another is that we have this beautiful open source commons that most devs make use of and we would like it to be richer.

Did they edit their comment after your reply? I'm not seeing aspects you refer to (esp the time/skill point)

agreed

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