Can you gather some performance metrics for Waydroid on your phone? My impression is that it is extremely slow due to it not running natively on eMMC. I would be interested to know your experience with Waydroid after running completely natively in eMMC.
Waydroid typically loads within 5-7 LineageOS animation cycles when on eMMC. Last year I tried booting from an SD card and timing how long it took to open Signal and send someone a message, and it took (trying to recall from memory) over 8 minutes. It was excruciatingly slow for me, and I’m a patient person.
My Waydroid has exploded and I didn’t make good enough backups.
Today I opened it up, initially it was fine
After some basic usage, Waydroid says it wants to update from version 18 to version 20. I tell it OK
I come back later and it says its done downloading and ready to restart
I restart it but it doesn’t come back. I try running Waydroid on command line and I end up seeing a message that mount has failed to mount /var/lib/waydroid/images/system.img
I try manually mounting it, same issue, it says to check dmesg
dmesg says something bad geometry and that sizes are wrong
I went online and found myself on docs.waydro.id, it hyperlinked to a sourceforge page with a download link for Waydroid 20 GAPPS version that I think would match the system.img that I should have had
I wait for this new one to download. Upon finishing it is 1.3GB instead of 400MB, but I use sudo and mv it into /var/lib/waydroid/images anyway and replace the old one
First attempt booting Waydroid “fails” (it’s possible I was just impatient) so I restart the physical machine (L5)
Now Waydroid boots, but all the UI is completely different, and it spams “System UI is going too slow” or whatever and I have to click Wait. In the past it did that occasionally but now it is NONSTOP
Waydroid Updater app (amidst clicking Wait Wait Wait Wait) says that I have System Image 20.0 up to date but Vendor Image 18 still
So it seems my Waydroid might be effectively bricked, and maybe Google upped the system requirements of Lineage to brick us. I could go back and try to measure performance like you’re asking but it’s going to be an uphill battle.
Edit:
Is this also why when I tried LineageOS Glodroid on a Pinephone recently it no longer worked? Increasing system requirements would be an easy way for Google to kill us. I’m sure they have people reading these forums, they’re probably working hard on this. I have a hunch that whatever time you spend figuring out how to run liberated Android, they’ll have 2x as many humans as you do paid to watch your progress and intuit how to make what you created fail in the next update.
…or maybe, as you already noticed, your automated update process has somehow failed and you ended up with a system image of Android 20 and a mismatched vendor image for Android 18. Update the vendor image manually as well, like you did with the system image already.
If you don’t care about the contents of the container, you could also just start over and let it download everything from scratch.
I was very dumb with my container. Android & friends seem to collect personal information like flies to a light bulb. I might sooner hand you the contents of my encrypted eMMC than the contents of my Waydroid app storages, which are on an unencrypted SD card. It’s totally stupid and backwards. But this is because the encrypted hard drive of my eMMC has dumb stuff, nude pictures of myself to share with my doctors, I don’t really care about that and could just blame it on AI if it leaked out. But the contents of my Waydroid app storages have a bunch of stinging technology made expressly to make-believe that Android is equivalent to a person’s identity, and therefore that stuff has the unlock codes to my job, the capability to message into my work’s system on behalf of myself, signal communicator for messaging certain phone-bound folks, and whatever else. When I think about it being deleted, it’s a bit cancerous how much of a backup plan I like to pretend that thing is, even though when it comes down to it and in terms of practicality, it isn’t.
Unrelated: is Android 20 really that ugly? the android 18 still looked like old androids and stuff. It was a throwback to when people made me use android phones a dozen years ago. Android 20 seemed visually worse, like some AI generated malarky to stress out the user.