As an analogy: I use Sway but it doesn’t stop me from running GTK apps. I could use Gnome as my desktop software — a giant GTK app for running other GTK apps — but I don’t have to.
Job scheduling, URL handling, settings daemons… we have standard tools for doing this as well on a Linux system. Somehow they remain only very loosely bound together and different bits can be omitted or swapped for alternatives.
With Android / AOSP, are the components bound tightly together? I suppose the acid test would be: can I run Google maps APK on my Linux desktop as an app showing in a native window, or do I have to run an entire android emulator which has to take over a portion of my screen (and provide separate versions of all its own system services) to run one app?
If a WINE-for-Android like thing exists, then I’d be very happy to run a standard Linux system on my phone and have it boot into an Android launcher that could run Android apps, but also be able to do anything else I wanted to do with a bare Linux system.
Steamdeck from Valve does exactly this and it’s very good. The stock behaviour is to boot into their launcher (SteamOS) but if you sang you can toggle to a KDE desktop, get a shell in a terminal emulator, and hack away on what is just a regular PC.
I think you're looking for waydroid? AFAIK it does in fact have most of an android system bundled into it and it doesn't do rootless windows (Android apps are rendered into a single window that contains an entire Android UI), but it absolutely works. Funny enough, I use it on my laptop because Anki has dependency problems on my system but the F-Droid version is fine.
>it doesn't do rootless windows (Android apps are rendered into a single window that contains an entire Android UI)
If you launch individual Android programs via `waydroid app intent ...`, they render as separate windows in the parent compositor. The single window for the entire Android UI is what you get if you run `waydroid show-full-ui`.
It's better to use the single window mode though. Splitting to separate windows is hacky and is never going to be 100% reliable unless completely reimplemented at a different layer.
I'm using Waydroid on my phone sometimes, and frankly, single window mode is all you need anyway.
Job scheduling, URL handling, settings daemons… we have standard tools for doing this as well on a Linux system. Somehow they remain only very loosely bound together and different bits can be omitted or swapped for alternatives.
With Android / AOSP, are the components bound tightly together? I suppose the acid test would be: can I run Google maps APK on my Linux desktop as an app showing in a native window, or do I have to run an entire android emulator which has to take over a portion of my screen (and provide separate versions of all its own system services) to run one app?
If a WINE-for-Android like thing exists, then I’d be very happy to run a standard Linux system on my phone and have it boot into an Android launcher that could run Android apps, but also be able to do anything else I wanted to do with a bare Linux system.
Steamdeck from Valve does exactly this and it’s very good. The stock behaviour is to boot into their launcher (SteamOS) but if you sang you can toggle to a KDE desktop, get a shell in a terminal emulator, and hack away on what is just a regular PC.