I had this crazy idea i dunno if something like that do already exist or not but…
If you could have a kind of remote desktop to an android device? I mean we can use our librem but some app will not be there anytime soon and some other apps will never land on our beloved L5, but immagine to have an android smartphone at home connected at wifi and you are far away but you can connect to it like a remote desktop we could use on librem5 all apps we want installed on our android phone.
What do you think? It’s already possible? Is needed a new program for librem5 and or for android?
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Though it’s not a priority for Purism, Anbox (https://anbox.io/) will eventually be configured to work on the Librem 5 and then it will be possible to access android apps as it will be effectively a containerised android within your linux environment.
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Jooka, it also available in Debian repository, but it is “contrib”. It means that it depends from something non-free.
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you might be able to use crossplatform software like teamviewer . I know teamviewer is on both linux and android.
Something like that ?
Anbox is still in early development and afaik only one guy is working on it, so i think will be the future, and i hope someone could invest on it, but for now is not the way to go, and as scaled showed is in contrib, and i don’t want install closed dependency on my libre smartphone, teamviewer is proprietary, so it’s not for me.
There is Remmina
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=remmina
It works on linux but dunno if there is something that can be installed on android side
For remote access, you could even run Android in a virtual machine on a server (or a home PC). That might be easier to set up, because the VM host could handle the remote access without having to install anything on Android to make it work.
Regardless of how you do it, the latency and graphics quality would probably be bad. It won’t be good for video or games, but it should work for apps that focus on text and still images.
I didn’t know Anbox contained non-Free software. I wonder if the non-Free part is part of the AOSP-derived Android image that runs “inside” Anbox. If that’s the case, then it might not be much of a compromise if you were already planning to install non-Free Android apps.
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I had the same idea, but this mean to have a computer to act as a kind of server with external access and things become complicated while using your android smartphone whould be easier if someone develop a app for android and another one for the librem5 that talk each other.
To make it works it could be needed a central server to sync the pubblic IP address of the android phone so the librem5 in the wild know where to connect, but i think an easier solution should be without a central server, just when u go home they will be connected at the same wifi and you just save your pubblic IP, and use it.
Probably not a perfect way, but it should just work.
The problem is some devs from community should work on both apps.
So you could have whatsapp, your bank app or whatever you need on your android and you can access it using this system.
I think this is the easier solution to run android apps on our librem5 since there is a lot of request to run some or another android apps, as said this system is not perfect, but that’s reliable, we just need a dev who wanna work to this project
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