Anyone Successfully Run WayDroid on Librem 5?

I have always enjoyed using the Librem5. I have a question, but can Librem5’s waidroid use Bluetooth and Japanese? I cannot input Japanese. Is there a way to achieve Bluetooth and Japanese input implementation?

Bluetooth

No.

Japanese input

Input is handled within Android, so it’s the same as it would be on Android phones. It’s hard for me to tell more since I barely know Android, and I know Japanese even less :slight_smile:

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@dos, two questions: Is it now “much simpler” after three weeks and your installation guide reflect this, i.e. was updated? Thanks for your work. I will not install this on my L5, but perhaps on the L5 of my 12-years old son to avoid buying him an Adroid phone, because his Ubuntu E4.5 does only support 2G network (due to a hardware limitation).

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has anyone else had trouble with the clipboard inside waydroid? it seems to copy from any app but paste is never an option… which has made typing my random / log passwords quite a challenge

There is a clipboard dependency that you need to install on your L5. I ran into this same issue. If I remember correctly, installing xclip resolved it

sudo apt install xclip

Almost. I’m a bit behind the schedule there :wink: libglibutil is already in PureOS; libgbinder is tagged but seems it got stuck somewhere in the pipeline - I’ll give it a push right now. Once it gets there, it will be time for gbinder-python, at which point installing waydroid will be just a matter of downloading a .deb from CI. Afterwards we can even think about uploading waydroid itself into the repos.

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Just a little bit curious, maybe someone has more in depth knowledge about that:

Is it correct that the Waydroid approach was just prioritized over Anbox because it worked better for now?

I mean that Waydroid ships a whole Android and starts that before opening any app whereas Anbox works with containerization (which should consume much less resources, save battery, etc.)

Doesn’t drain Waydroid much more battery? Is Anbox still some option for the future or is there no plan to use that someday?

I think those with more in depth knowledge can be found here: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux/-/issues/427

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Anbox and Waydroid work in essentially the same way. Where they differ is how they get the graphics out onto the screen - Anbox uses APIs used by Android’s virtual machine (goldfish), while Waydroid implements a Wayland client inside the Android image. Both run an LXC container with a full Android system (Anbox’s default images seem to be quite stripped out compared to Waydroid’s ones though).

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Ah, thanks for this info. I was under the impression, Anbox works “like WINE”. Are there any experiences how Waydroid influences the battery runtime?

Can the user spoof some input towards the Waydroid? For example, fake phone number, fake IMSI, fake GEO location?

Are cases of escaping the Waydroid container known?

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With enough effort and some patches, all of that should be possible :stuck_out_tongue: I’m not aware of ready solutions though.

I’m pretty sure someone will find one once they start seriously looking, so don’t rely on it as a security boundary - it isn’t one.

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You are breaking my heart. The Waydroid idea certainly sounds like a security boundary even if not bulletproof.

Hi All, anyone got google play store working ?

I use Aurora which I got working straight from fdroid

I have xclip… still no clipbpard

A big shout of thanks to everyone on this thread. thanks to @weirdnerd for starting it, and especially @dos for the backend work and instructions.

the instructions worked great for me. I"ve got waydroid installed and running. I’m impressed by the performance, very responsive. In particular, @dos thanks for the tips on freezing and resuming! that really makes it easy to manage the power consumption!

I’m testing use of waydroid for email clients like protonmail and tutanota, as well as signal. At this point, I got them all running and their responsiveness is nice. I’ll have to see how notifications work. With signal, it won’t be for audio/video calls obviously since there is no access to those devices. But, my family uses signal, so chatting is helpful. I was able to do a backup/restore, from my android phone and that worked well.

@dos, one question about file exchange. Is there an easy and secure way to share a file between L5 and waydroid? I saw what you mentioned for installing privileged apps with /var/lib/waydroid/overlay but, can that work for file exchange? can I access that location from within waydroid? I’m asking because if I get an email attachment using a protonmail app, in WD, I’d like to use the L5 tools to work with the file. and vice versa. To get my Signal backup file into WD, I had to put the file in a cloud location, then access it from the browser. wondering if there is an easier way to do this?

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Install and use syncthing for that

Overlays are meant for modifying system images. While they can be used for data sharing, it’s a massive overkill :wink:

Use adb connect as described in the guide and simply move files around via adb like you would with a regular Android phone with adb push / adb pull. You can also access the data partition directly in ~/.local/share/waydroid/data/, but you’ll have to be careful about file permissions there.

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Thanks @dos. that makes sense. I haven’t used adb push/pull before. So, it will be good to learn that.

@Lionel, I tried syncthing on the L5, but couldn’t get that to work.