How to Run Android Apps and Games on Linux – Guide
Before Microsoft could bring native Android app support to Windows 11, Linux spoiled the party. WayDroid is a kind of compatibility layer that lets you run Android apps on any Linux distribution. The great thing about WayDroid is that you get better performance, even better than a custom Android emulator or a virtual machine running Android x86 on Linux. It looks like you are running Android apps natively on your Linux machine. With that said, let’s not waste too much time and learn how to run android apps on linux without emulator.
How to Run Android apps and games on Linux
anbox
Anbox is conceptually similar to Wine (a free and open source compatibility layer that makes it possible to run Windows apps on Linux) in that it abstracts access to hardware and integrates Android apps with the Linux operating system. The entire project is open source and licensed under the terms of the Apache License and GPLv3. The aim of its developers is to make all Android apps and games run on Linux. As Anbox runs without hardware virtualization, it offers decent performance and full integration with the host OS. Since Anbox is exclusively distributed as a snap (its developers claim that snaps make their lives a lot easier and allow them to release updates frequently without needing to customize them for various distributions), you can install it only on supported distributions, unless you install Snap manually, which takes just a few simple commands, all of which are described in detail on the Snap website. With Anbox installed, you can add APKs using the Android Debug Bridge (adb). Then you can launch your apps through the host system’s app launcher and manage them like all other apps running on your system.
arc welder
If you are a Google Chrome user, you can run Android apps on Linux using ARC Welder, also known as App Runtime for Chrome. This Chrome extension is meant to allow Android developers to test and publish their Android apps on Chrome OS on other platforms, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it for your personal purposes. As Arc Welder is a developer tool, it does not provide access to apps published on the Google Play Store. To run an Android app, you first need to find and download its APK file and then open the file using Arc Welder. Fortunately, there are many sites that allow you to easily download APK files, including APKMirror, APKPure, or APK Store. Unfortunately, Arc Welder was last updated in June 2018, so bugs are to be expected. Still, it would be hard to find an easier way to run Android apps on Linux.
Genymotion
As this is the year 2020, we can no longer recommend the once-popular Android emulation solution called Shashlik. The last version of Shashlik was released in 2016, and its developers have been quiet ever since. However, we can recommend something even better. Genymotion.
android-x86
Android-x86 is a project whose goal is to port Android to the x86 instruction set. As Android-x86 is a full operating system, you need virtualization software like VirtualBox to run it on your Linux distribution. When configuring up a VirtualBox virtual machine for Android-x86, Set Type to Linux and Version to Linux 2.6 or newer. Allocate at least 2 GB of RAM and create a new hard disk image with 8 GB of storage space or more. Load the Android-x86 installation image and follow the official installation instructions. When running Android-x86 inside a virtual machine, you cannot expect great performance because Android-x86 must run on bare metal.
Android Studio IDE
Android Studio IDE is Google’s official integrated development environment for Android. It is built on JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA software and runs on Linux, Windows, macOS and Chrome OS. Included in the Android Studio IDE is an Android emulator intended for running and debugging apps in Android studio. To install the emulator, choose the Android Emulator component from the SDK Tools tab of the SDK Manager. Open the app you want to run and click the green play-like button in the menu bars at the top. When prompted to choose a device, click the Create New Virtual Device button button and specify its properties. When finished, select it from the list of available virtual devices and click OK. The virtual device should start up immediately and open your app automatically. The Android Emulator inside the Android Studio IDE doesn’t exactly surprise you with its performance or usability, but it does the job when you just want to run a single Android app on Linux without installing it on your smartphone.
Final note
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