This thread is quite literally a description of how I arrived at my “better idea.”
I observed that when I use waydroid session stop or whatever they tell you, that ps faux | grep waydroid indicated some Waydroid related processes remain running on the device even after I tell the Waydroid to stop. I’m sure there are some technical details there – some seemingly valid excuse for such design, and it probably improves Waydroid performance to be always running – but I only ever installed Waydroid on my Librem 5 once I bought a new one. Thereby, I was only infecting the backup/toy and not my literal phone that I carry with me.
When I need my Android authentication app at work, as described above in this thread, I open the terminal on my Librem 5, connect a secure tunnel (ssh -NL) to forward a port on my cloud server to the local loopback, and then I open a VNC viewer app on the Librem 5 which is a portal into the Waydroid system running on the cloud. This has at least two advantages over actually running Waydroid:
- It starts up almost instantly because Waydroid and the app I need were already running in the cloud, and all I’m doing is opening a remote VNC connection to view the cloud Waydroid device
- My physical handset does not need to run Waydroid, ever, and Waydroid has never been installed on it – so Waydroid related processes cannot be “left running” in the background for any reason
- I can access the Waydroid cloud device from multiple machines, so my authentication is bound to my SSH key for creating the secure tunnel rather than to a single particular handset
The obvious downsides of this, of course, were:
- Higher setup time than the Waydroid tutorial on Purism’s site, since I literally had to follow that same tutorial but from inside a VPS, and establish my own VNC to that VPS
- The server I am renting, in order to run sway+wayvnc+Waydroid, is costing me about $300/year because I didn’t want it to lag and I wanted a smooth, clean Waydroid experience that actually works on that remote server
- The VNC viewer that I use is not fully ported to mobile and doesn’t work super well on Phosh. Honestly it works better on my Librem 14 actually
- The sway+wayvnc+Waydroid system in the cloud periodically runs out of memory, at a rate of about once per 1.5-2 weeks, crashing the Waydroid instance into a state that requires command line to fix, at least currently. The command line doesn’t work properly and misinterprets keyboard keys from the Librem 5 on screen keyboard, so in order to actually restart the apps on this cloud instance (again about once per 1.5-2 weeks) I have to log in with my Librem 14 and restart sway+wayvnc, then restart Waydroid, which clears out the container back to running again
