Waydroid

Waydroid is an application which uses LXC containers to run Android applications on a non-Android system.

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Warning: Waydroid requires a Wayland desktop session and cannot be used on X11 directly, but can be run in a nested Wayland session, using e.g. cage.

Installation

⚠︎

Warning: Installing Waydroid on your system before running nixos-generate-config will create unnecessary fstab entries that may interfere with system functionality.

Enable Waydroid in your system configuration:

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{
  virtualisation.waydroid.enable = true;
  # Newer kernel versions may need
  virtualisation.waydroid.package = pkgs.waydroid-nftables;

  # Enable clipboard sharing
  environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.wl-clipboard ];
}

After rebuilding and switching, finish the Waydroid install in your shell.

Fetch Waydroid images.
You can add the parameters "-s GAPPS -f" to have GApps support.
$ sudo waydroid init

How to certify a waydroid device for GAPPS[1]

Before the following steps, you might need to do some GPU adjustments. See the troubleshooting section.

Usage

Start the container and userspace Wayland session. You'll know it is finished when you see the message "Android with user 0 is ready".

$ sudo systemctl start waydroid-container
$ waydroid session start

General usage

Start Android UI
$ waydroid show-full-ui

List Android apps
$ waydroid app list

Start an Android app
$ waydroid app launch <application name>

Install an Android app
$ waydroid app install </path/to/app.apk>

Enter the LXC shell
$ sudo waydroid shell

Overrides the full-ui width
$ waydroid prop set persist.waydroid.width 608

Maintenance

Update Android

Use following command to upgrade Android (LineageOS) to a newer version if available

$ sudo waydroid upgrade

Resetting Android Container

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Warning: All files of your Android container will be lost

Stop Waydroid container
$ sudo systemctl stop waydroid-container

Removing images and user data
$ sudo rm -r /var/lib/waydroid/* ~/.local/share/waydroid

Tips and tricks

Mount host directories

Install and configure graphical application waydroid-helper

environment.systemPackages =  [ pkgs.waydroid-helper ];

systemd = {
  packages = [ pkgs.waydroid-helper ];
  services.waydroid-mount.wantedBy = [ "multi-user.target" ];
};

Enable the user service which is also required. Note that this is not persistent and needs to get started after reboot again.

systemctl --user start waydroid-monitor

Now start waydroid-helper application and add a shared directory. As an example, source directory could be /home/myuser/Public and target directory /home/myuser/.local/share/waydroid/data/media/0/NixOS. Ensure that both directories already exist locally. After that you might need to restart the Waydroid container which is also possible with the graphical user interface.

GPS/Location forwarding

First enable geoclue2 and adb daemon on the host

services.geoclue2.enable = true;
programs.adb.enable = true;

Enable location provider in your desktop environment. For Gnome Shell you can do this

gsettings set org.gnome.system.location enabled true

To test and see location

nix shell nixpkgs#geoclue2 -c $(nix eval --raw nixpkgs#geoclue2)/libexec/geoclue-2.0/demos/where-am-i

Get IP address of the Waydroid guest and connect adb to it

waydroid shell ip addr show
adb connect <IP>:5555

Download, initialize and run geobridge script

wget https://gitlab.com/papiris/geobridge/-/raw/main/geobridge.sh
sh geobridge.sh --init

V4L2 camera forwarding

Camera forwarding using V4L2 is broken on upstream, but can be achieved by using the Waydroid images of the Waydroid-ATV project. You might need to reset your existing Waydroid environment. Then stop the container and fetch the latest Waydroid-ATV images.

systemctl stop waydroid-container
waydroid init -f \
  -c https://waydroid-atv.github.io/ota/a16-qpr2/system \
  -v https://waydroid-atv.github.io/ota/a16-qpr2/vendor \
  -r lineage \
  -s GAPPS
systemctl start waydroid-container
waydroid session start

In case the graphical interface wont show up or the setup wizard fails you can do

waydroid shell -- am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -c android.intent.category.HOME  
waydroid shell -- pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.setupwizard
waydroid shell -- pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.gms.setup

In case the camera access will crash the Waydroid container, there's a recent image which solves this on AMD GPUs. Download it and extract the contents to /etc/waydroid-extra/images. After that recreate the environment as mentioned above but only issue waydroid init -f.

Running applications that differ from the current host architecture via libhoudini or libndk

Run nix shell github:nix-community/NUR#repos.ataraxiasjel.waydroid-script -c sudo waydroid-script

Or, alternatively, add nur.repos.ataraxiasjel.waydroid-script from the NUR to your flake or shell or NixOS environment.systemPackages, or HM home.packages or something like that based on readme and run sudo waydroid-script

In the TUI, select Android 13 > Install > libhoudini (or libndk, which script author claims may be faster on AMD)

Troubleshooting

GPU Adjustments

In case you have an NVIDIA card or an RX 6800 series, you'll need to disable GBM and mesa-drivers:

≡︎ /var/lib/waydroid/waydroid_base.prop

ro.hardware.gralloc=default
ro.hardware.egl=swiftshader

See Also:

• Waydroid article on the Archlinux Wiki