The Android Runtime On Chrome OS Makes Use Of Wayland

[starshipeleven]

unapproved post for liam here

[GizmoChicken]

Wow, that I didn't know. Would have thought we would have seen a big boon to the shashlik project

There doesn't seem to have been much activity on the Shashlik project for several months.

Nonetheless, I posted a comment/question on their GitHub issues page. In that post, I wrote:

If I understand correctly, Shashlik relies on QEMU to run a stripped down version of Android as a VM. On the other hand, to run Android apps on their Chromebooks, Google, if I’m not mistaken, relies on containerization (probably using LXC) to run a stripped down version of Android as a container. Does that sound about right?

According to two Google devs, other than the Android container itself, pretty much everything required for running Android apps on Chromebooks has been released as open source. See https://groups.google.com/a/chromium...ss/OfBln-hl7ug

Would there be any advantage if Shashlik relied on containerization rather than QEMU?

See https://github.com/shashlik/shashlik-build/issues/28

No reply yet, and there probably never will be one. But maybe the included link will lead to further discussion.

[liam]

Their runtime is a Chrome/ium addon due to obvious reasons (ChromeOS), porting it to run without Chrome/ium is a Wine-like project that none (apart from Google) can be really interested in paying for.

OK, I think I misunderstood your previous post, but I'm not exactly sure how (except that the person you were responding to was wondering why no other orgs had yet done the work).

There is no real monetary benefit in making a layer to run apps for Google, for free.

NM, I read that sentence to mean that GOOGLE had no incentive to make such a layer.
Basically, we understood that "for" to have two different meanings

[liam]

That's what I'm saying. Their compatibilty layer is just a big fat bait to get someone into expanding Google's ecosystem somewhere else.
Because also Android is just a big fat bait, Google isn't "good", they didn't release it as open because of their love of kittens.

Was this meant for me?
I never meant to indicate that Google would do such things out of altruism (personally, I don't believe that ANY "normal" person has such "motivations"), and specified that their reasons would be the same as their reasons for most of their service options.
As an aside, I'm a big fan of Google because their modus operandi results in a near ideal combination of free (they also have a ton a libre projects), quality services. They are also (nearly?) unique in offering a way out of their ecosystem while keeping a lot of your data (Checkouts---it's not offered for every service, but, again, I've not seen any other major service provider offer the like).

[mcirsta]

As as C/C++ programmer I'm pretty sure that if I put enough time and resources into this it should be possible to port this ChromeOS Android compatibility layer to Gnu/Linux. I'm not sure how long it would take me though , might be a year, might be less, could be more ....
I've thought about doing this but I've come to the conclusion that this is not what I want to happen. I don't want to see Linux invaded by a couple of closed source Java ( I know it's Dalvik or whatever but I call it Java ) + binary blobs that are designed for a mobile and touch screen form factor.
I really like to see quality Qt5 apps that use native code and have those run on my system so I think my effort will be better spent elsewhere. Maybe that's how other developers think, I'm sure some of them think along these lines.

[aironeous]

Sailfish OS is flashed over the top of Cyanogen Mod. For a while there they (the community porters porting the various Android devices to Sailfish) went back and forth on what solution to come up with to run Android apps - Arc, Gentroid, Shaslik, and I think there was the one from Maemo but it only ran certain types of apps were all considered. After running into various barriers they decided to just get the underlying CM running in a window. They got that running on a few devices. I used to read their IRC logs until I think about 4 months ago maybe a little longer. At the time I think they had 3 devices running it. They were calling it Android in a window.

If you want to run Android apps on your laptop you can go the superbook way. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...nto-a-laptop-f

or you can try this http://news.softpedia.com/news/andex...c-507935.shtml

[aironeous]

Here is exton's website if you are interested in trying any of his work out. http://www.exton.se/

[Michael_S]

As an aside, I'm a big fan of Google because their modus operandi results in a near ideal combination of free (they also have a ton a libre projects), quality services. They are also (nearly?) unique in offering a way out of their ecosystem while keeping a lot of your data (Checkouts---it's not offered for every service, but, again, I've not seen any other major service provider offer the like).

If you value your freedom and privacy, Google's business model has some fundamental problems:

1. They collect data about users for targeted advertising. The more details they can collect, the better their ad revenue so they work very hard to collect as much as they can. I'm not comfortable with any company having this much data about most citizens - especially when intelligence agencies in the US repeatedly violate the law, exceed their jurisdiction, and access information without cause.

2. Google releases useful software as open source, but they keep their core services as proprietary to maintain their market advantage and facilitate data collection. Google also does not push their device partners to release device drivers. Hundreds of millions of older Android phones are too slow to match the latest Samsung Galaxy whatever but faster than a Raspberry Pi. If the full source code was available, you could install Android 5, Debian, or whatever you want on it and repurpose it as part of a baby monitoring system or a toy web server or whatever you want. Instead, it's in the recycle bin because you can't do anything other than run an older version of Android with unpatched security vulnerabilities.

3. The Android App Store and Chrome Web Store facilitate the sale and distribution of proprietary applications. So in addition to Google's own data collection and privacy violations and DRM, you have those things from thousands of other pieces of software too.

Now to be clear, I understand that Google exists to make profits and I understand why 97% of the population considers these violations of their freedoms acceptable in return for access to the services Google provides. But you can't call Google a company with "an ideal combination of free". They are ultimately as much an enemy of user freedom and privacy as Microsoft and Apple.

[GizmoChicken]

Sailfish OS is flashed over the top of Cyanogen Mod. For a while there they (the community porters porting the various Android devices to Sailfish) went back and forth on what solution to come up with to run Android apps - Arc, Gentroid, Shaslik, and I think there was the one from Maemo but it only ran certain types of apps were all considered.

Do you recall if they gave any consideration to OpenMobile's ACL? (See http://www.openmobileww.com.) And if they did, what were the reasons for not working with them?

I'll just add the, at one time, OpenMobile was working closely with Samsung to run Android apps on Samsung's Tizen OS phones. But I don't know if that was/is an exclusive relationship, or if OpenMobile is available to work with others.

[Hi-Angel]

What you wrote makes little sense, if at all: specifically for linux there's very little closed source projects that they're contributing to. I can name just a couple of extensions to Chromium, transforming it into Chrome.

Hello? Android apps are NOT open on average, are distributed through non-free channels, and they also have DRM and whatever.
All opensource foundations aren't going to do that with their own money.

Let's read together what I wrote.
"Perhaps you meant something Android specific, then the point of the discussion is that its ecosystem is divergent of GNU/Linux one, and I was wondering why to not bring it here."
divergent of GNU/Linux
divergent

You fail to understand what this means. Android has a well-established and vast ecosystem that can and probably will squash Linux's if given chance. It's like if you magically turned Wine into what it is supposed to be instead of a broken mess of hacks. Poof, you can use all windows programs on Linux too.

You're exaggerating.
1. Android ecosystem consist mostly of games. Everything else I can think of, are readers, drawing apps, messengers, and have its analogs on GNU/Linux.
2. Android compatibility layer waaay more easier to do than Windows one. Such a layer won't turn into very long and constantly evolving project like WINE is. See, Jolla even already fully functional one, though closed source.
3. WINE isn't a broken mess of hacks, where did you get it? Almost everything in WinAPI nicely match onto Linux one, with the exception of DirectX, which is indeed fundamentally different. And neither the code is bad, at least from a couple of times I was a need to look at it, to find out some warning/errors I got, everything was clean and well commented.

Any such distro would likely become "the lower layer" under what would basically be an Android system.

This is probably why you fail to understand.

I'm VERY interested in running Android on a PC, because it is an opensource system written from scratch keeping in mind most learned lessons from older OSes, and has an ecosystem that is vast as Windows's.

Hi, I'm one of them. My world domination plan is getting a Windows tablet or convertible and replace the OS with Android x86.
There are so many good reasons that it hurts.

May I ask you: what lessons Android learned, that GNU/Linux didn't?

If the people installs Android apps in Linux Desktop and mostly use them as there are FAR more quality apps than linux programs (apart from the workstation stuff and PC games anyway), you end up hurting Linux as developers will likely target Android "because it also runs on Linux".

What quality apps you're talking about? Everything I use everyday didn't have a better analog in Android. As I think, people mostly like Android because of games, which are not that better than GNU/Linux ones, rather just presented in a much bigger amount.