Recently, we curated a list of top Android emulators for Linux systems and were disappointed to find that there is no proper application that can mimic Android on a Linux distro. That said, we did find a cool way to run Android on Linux using a virtual machine with Play Store support. And in fact, it works better than emulators due to better binary translation and desktop-like features. So in this article, we are going to show you how to run Android on Linux using a virtual machine. On that note, let’s go ahead and learn about the steps without any delay.
Before we go ahead, let me briefly explain how we are going to run Android on Linux. We are going to use an open-source project called Android-x86 that ports ARM-based Android OS to x86 based systems. Basically, with Android-x86’s ISO image, you can boot Android on any desktop platform, be it Windows or Linux.
- Basic Setup
- Configure the Android VM
- Boot Android within Linux
Basic Setup
First of all, download the ISO image of Android 9 from here. Depending on your computer architecture, choose either a 64-bit or 32-bit ISO image. By the way, currently, Android 9 is the latest OS ported for desktop computers.
Once you have downloaded the Android ISO image, go ahead and download VirtualBox. You can find the setup file for all Linux distributions from here. After the download is complete, install VirtualBox on your system.
Select “Dynamically allocated” and click on “Next”.
Now that you have created the VM, it’s time to configure a few things so that you get the best performance while running Android on Linux. On the VirtualBox, click on “System“.
Once you have done that, move to the “Display” section and change the “Graphics controller” to “VBoxSVGA“. This is the most important step otherwise you will be stuck on a blank screen. Besides that, increase the Video Memory to at least 64-128MB.
After the basic setup and configuration, you are now ready to boot Android on Linux. Simply, select “Android” on the left pane and then click on “Start“.
Now, select “Auto_Installation…” and hit enter.
In case, you want to delete Android from Linux then simply right-click on the Android VM that you have created and choose “Remove”.
So that is how you can install and run Android on Linux without using an emulator. One of the added benefits of this setup is that it makes things possible that you cannot do on your Android smartphone like taking screenshots on Snapchat without notifying sender, screen recording of protected content, playing games like PUBG, and much more.
