Guide: Setup Latest Waydroid for Hardware Acceleration and/or Development

[nroth]

TL;DR: Click the link to get Waydroid with hardware acceleration or if you're interested in building an image from source for development purposes.

Guide lives here: Waydroid for PinePhone Pro

Waydroid is a popular Android emulation environment for Linux that uses a lightweight container to run apps. Though a release based on LineageOS 17.1 is available on many package repositories, it doesn't meet everyone's needs. The official 17.1 release doesn't support graphics hardware acceleration on the RK3399 (i.e. PinePhone Pro), which is important for usability. Additionally, the official instructions do not provide everything developers need to build a working daily-driver-ready image from the latest sources, which they may want in order to test features and fixes that they plan to upstream on their personal phones. This guide attempts to help users who want hardware acceleration but don't have it on 17.1 (e.g., PinePhone Pro users) and developers who want to test new features and fixes on their daily drivers.

[timonoj]

TL;DR: Click the link to get Waydroid with hardware acceleration or if you're interested in building an image from source for development purposes.

Guide lives here: Waydroid for PinePhone Pro

Waydroid is a popular Android emulation environment for Linux that uses a lightweight container to run apps. Though a release based on LineageOS 17.1 is available on many package repositories, it doesn't meet everyone's needs. The official 17.1 release doesn't support graphics hardware acceleration on the RK3399 (i.e. PinePhone Pro), which is important for usability. Additionally, the official instructions do not provide everything developers need to build a working daily-driver-ready image from the latest sources, which they may want in order to test features and fixes that they plan to upstream on their personal phones. This guide attempts to help users who want hardware acceleration but don't have it on 17.1 (e.g., PinePhone Pro users) and developers who want to test new features and fixes on their daily drivers.

Thanks. This works. Sadly, it ends with a Gapps-enabled image, which I didn't want. So I went through the "compile-your-own" version right on the same guide. I have to be honest, for a first attempt, the instructions were rather straightforward. And just after 280GB of storage and about 6 hours of CPU time on my old Core i7, I got a working image without Gapps, that does indeed work with waydroid!

[nroth]

TL;DR: Click the link to get Waydroid with hardware acceleration or if you're interested in building an image from source for development purposes.

Guide lives here: Waydroid for PinePhone Pro

Waydroid is a popular Android emulation environment for Linux that uses a lightweight container to run apps. Though a release based on LineageOS 17.1 is available on many package repositories, it doesn't meet everyone's needs. The official 17.1 release doesn't support graphics hardware acceleration on the RK3399 (i.e. PinePhone Pro), which is important for usability. Additionally, the official instructions do not provide everything developers need to build a working daily-driver-ready image from the latest sources, which they may want in order to test features and fixes that they plan to upstream on their personal phones. This guide attempts to help users who want hardware acceleration but don't have it on 17.1 (e.g., PinePhone Pro users) and developers who want to test new features and fixes on their daily drivers.

Thanks. This works. Sadly, it ends with a Gapps-enabled image, which I didn't want. So I went through the "compile-your-own" version right on the same guide. I have to be honest, for a first attempt, the instructions were rather straightforward. And just after 280GB of storage and about 6 hours of CPU time on my old Core i7, I got a working image without Gapps, that does indeed work with waydroid!

I'm so glad to see this works for you! If there's anything that could be made clearer, feel free to leave comments on the doc while your experience is fresh and I'll make sure to incorporate them.