Anbox: Android Emulator For Linux, Run Android Apps In Linux

Anbox is a new software which totally converts your PC system and gives it an Android environment. “Anbox puts the Android operating s...

Anbox is a new software which totally converts your PC system and gives it an Android environment.

“Anbox puts the Android operating system into a container, abstracts hardware access and integrates core system services in a GNU Linux system. Every Android application will behave integrated into your operating system like any other native application,” the projects says on its official website.

“To achieve our goal, we use standard Linux technologies like containers (LXC) to separate the Android operating system from the host. The Android version doesn’t matter for this approach and we try to keep up with the latest available version of the Android Open Source project.”

Ever wanted to run android applications and games on your PC. Many developers have already been offering emulators like BlueStacks and Genymotion that lets you run Android Applications On Windows. These applications, build a virtual machine that emulates the Android shell in an isolated environment and separates it from the rest of the host operating system. These types of emulators never work according to us and you'll never be satisfied with how they work completely different than the real Android system.

Although Android is actually based on the Linux kernel, same as GNU/Linux operating systems, it was never been easier to run a full Android System on a PC without setting up a virtual machine or via a dual boot setup. Thankfully, Anbox is here to save us.

Anbox is a new open source project that lets you run Android apps on a PC natively as if they were a part of your operating system same as other desktop applications. Anbox, aka “Android in a Box”, is an open source project that allows you to run Android apps on your Linux desktop without any need of virtual machines or dual boot setups. Anbox place the Android OS into a Linux container (LXC) which allows it to share the Linux kernel, but also isolate the host from the Android OS. And because of that Anbox doesn’t allow any direct hardware access.
In a blog post Anbox's developer, Simon Fels writes.

“Anbox itself is still in its early phase and is in a pre-alpha state where crashes and instability is expected. The next phase of development will focus on stability and bug fixing and will add more necessary features to integrate better with the host operating system,”

When you install Anbox for the first time, you’ll get a few stock Android apps preinstalled such as Calculator, Contacts, email, Gallery, and Files apps. And to install more Android apps, You will have set up ad from the terminal. Anbox does not come with the Play Store preinstalled, so if you want an app store, you can install the Google Play Store or a different app store via adb.

Features Of Anbox
 Open Source - The whole source code is available as Open Source and licensed under the terms of the Apache and GPLv3 license.
 No limits - As Anbox is running an entire Android system, conceptually any application can run.
 Secure - Anbox puts Android apps into a tightly sealed box without direct access to hardware or your data.
 Performant - Runs Android without hardware virtualization and seamlessly bridges over hardware acceleration features.
 Integrated - Tightly integrated with the host operating system to offer a rich feature set.
 Convergent - Anbox scales across different form factors similar like Android does. It works on a laptop and a mobile phone.

Previews: "click on the images for larger preview"

         

         

How to Install Anbox In Any Linux Distro Like - Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint
Installing Anbox on a regular Linux system isn't hard when you already have the ability to install snaps. If your system doesn't support snaps, then there is no easy way for you to install Anbox. This might change, though in the near future. Installing Anbox is pretty easy as it comes with an installer which installs all necessary files automatically. Anbox installer requires root privileges on your systems as it has to install things like additional kernel modules via DKMS. If you want to, you can have a look at the installer script here.

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• WARNING
• Before you go ahead and install Anbox on your system, please keep in mind that Anbox currently is ALPHA level software. Not every feature is supposed to work or to work well yet. You will find bugs, you will see crashes and unexpected problems. If you do so, please report a bug here.

Well, if you're willing to install and test Anbox on your system all you need to do is to run the following command and the installer will tell you about everything it is doing and will prompt for any further necessary input from your side:

[$ snap install --classic anbox-installer && anbox-installer]

If you need more help or want to see what happens during the installation, you can have a look at the installation video: [Here ##film##]

As Anbox is an open source project, any developer who wants, can contribute to the project on the project’s Github page. You can contact Anbox developers on the FreeNode network or on their Telegram chat group. If you want to report any bugs, then you can report them on their Github issues page.