theoretically, is there an android compatibility layer (like waydroid) that uses a VM instead? if i ditch iOS, i want to put proprietary apps in their own VM for security.

somebody is going to ask, “why not android itself, or AOSP, or graphene or calyx or whatever”

i hate the android user experience. i just do. it just doesn’t work for me. everytime i try android, i go back to iOS after a month.

the *only* interface on a linux phone that i have ever resonated with is #SXMO. it is, bluntly, the alpine of phone interfaces.

but i need slack, 1password, banking apps, etc.

@ariadne what felt like friction when using grapheneOS?

@feliks i just hate android in general. it’s about how information is organized and presented in iOS and SXMO. android is activity-oriented while iOS and SXMO are more data-oriented. i used to use blackberry for the same reason, for what it’s worth…

@feliks what is frustrating is that android used to be data-oriented and iOS was activity-oriented. they basically switched sides 3 or 4 years ago?

@ariadne Been a while since I tried sxmo but one thing that felt funny with it on pinephone is making me feel like it deserves a feature phone keypad or at least the 5 buttons + arrow-keys of feature phones.
And I've been daily driving a feature phone since, so doesn't helps, making me feel like next phone will be a nokia feature phone with maybe trying to get sxmo on it.

Plus well previous was SailfishOS, so Android UI clone just felt like a huge regression.

@angelthorns hence running it in a VM

@ariadne you might be able to use Waydroid and just replace the container with a VM, depending on the way Waydroid works (I haven't checked what all it's doing)

@ariadne what do you mean by data-oriented and activity-oriented?

@angelthorns well i don’t *need* banking apps, but slack and such i do need :p

@ariadne @feliks if you liked BB10, you may like Marathon OS: https://marathonos.xyz/
Based on PostMarketOS, but it doesn't solve the "Android in VM" problem

@feliks instead of data living in apps, data is shared across apps as a first class design element.

@feliks for example: on sxmo, everything is basically a resource. you can ssh into your phone and query those resources from the ssh session.

iOS is less pure, but you could imagine data being shared across apps and plumbed using shortcuts as a more crude example of this

@ariadne i believe i get what you mean now. but then isn't the ecosysystem around iOS walling you in? can you still enjoy the plumbing? is that resource sharing between apps done with a consistent API?

@ariadne @feliks Android has always been activity-centric from a system and framework design standpoint, but over time the security folks kept winning arguments for further and further compartmentalizing application data, more actively preventing traditional data-centric apps from working well. It is quite frustrating.

@feliks yes iOS has APIs for plumbing data. apps can also RPC to other apps.

@ariadne Just brainstorming here, ignoring any personal bias for the companies involved, the only two pieces I know about this puzzle are qualcomm's gunyah and "Android pKVM". ( hmm, and maybe also Google's crosvm ? )

I guess the main thing is that you seem to want a base Linux phone that runs VMs and not containers of Android apps. with my current knowledge, this requirement basically starts from two bigger paths, either a hypervisor on the phone like gunyah or a Linux base phone with qemu and VM particular management. I suspect the hypervisor will generally have better performance and battery life.

I have no idea how stable any of those paths would be or what would an up to date design for this scenario would look like, but you did ignite my curiosity. I have an old OnePlus 6T I will spend some time on figuring this out, mainly also for me, but will share any findings. Will also check this thread for more answers of course as well.

@swetland @feliks maybe “AI” provides pressure to move back in the direction of a more data-centric architecture

@ariadne @swetland MCP certainly does

@ariadne Years ago I remembered android-x86 was a thing? LineageOS also supports QEMU targets.
BTW, Waydroid isn't really a compatibility layer, it runs fully-fledged android inside an lxc container basically. ATL (Android-Translation-Layer) is a compat layer

@ariadne I use Android itself (lineageos), frankly I hate it
but I also hate iOS

@OatPotato @ariadne @feliks IIRC it is partly vibecoded?

@fun @feliks @ariadne really? Another project I'll stop recommending 😐

@OatPotato @feliks @ariadne don't quote me on that, I'm not exactly sure

do your own research

@fun @feliks @ariadne I didn't find anything by doing a quick lookup on the repo but I guess it would require a more complete review to be sure

@ariadne ChromeOS runs Android inside a VM, called ARCVM. I'm not sure if it's all open source, but some of it, at least, lives here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/refs/heads/main/arc/vm/

@ariadne There's Qubes OS. Afaik they run everything in VMs.

@OatPotato @feliks @ariadne the earlier commits do look vibecoded to me, e.g. https://github.com/patrickjquinn/Marathon-Shell/commit/8d6493bf276d232f031f74bba0010b24a28389b4

Not sure about the newer ones though

@swetland @ariadne android provides lots of APIs where apps can be a "provider" or "consumer" of Something in a secure™ way and it all works well today (e.g. I have a calendar account provided by DAVx⁵, edit events in Fossify Calendar, and view the upcoming agenda directly in Niagara Launcher)… Well, when apps actually play along (hello PROTON)