Launch Android apps on Linux with Anbox

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Article from Issue 229/2019
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Have you ever wished you could use an Android smartphone app on your Linux desktop? Thanks to Anbox and Snap, you can launch Android apps in a Linux virtual environment.

Linux already supports Java applications on the desktop, as well as native programs. You can rehash some legacy Windows software with Wine or Crossover. With the help of the DOSbox in Linux, you can even breathe life into very old applications for the 16-bit DOS operating system.

Anbox [1] pursues a similar approach. You can integrate a full-fledged Android operating system under Linux with a few simple steps and work with the included apps even more comfortably than on your Android smartphone.

The free Anbox software is only available as source code and as a Snap archive [2]. This means that the application only runs on Linux distributions that support Snap's virtual container technology, which includes all Ubuntu and Debian derivatives.

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