One cannot deny the influence of Android Smartphones on people's lives. Nowadays, there are a lot of helpful applications available on the market which have a high influence on our daily life, whether it is for watching movies, reading news, or keeping you close to your loved ones, smartphones have truly evolved to be a handy solution.
There are many Linux users who want to run their favourite android apps on their Linux platform. To initiate these features, you will need an Android Emulator that can run in Linux.
Basically, Emulator is a program that lets you run software that is from a completely different device. Android-Emulators provides an environment to run the android applications on any other platform except android.
Here are 5 best emulators that you can use to run and test Android Applications on Linux :
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| Photo Credit: maketecheasier.com |
Anbox is a free and open-source compatibility layer that aims to allow mobile applications and mobile games developed for Android to run on Linux distributions. Canonical introduced Anbox Cloud, for running Android applications in a cloud environment.
Anbox executes the Android runtime environment by using LXC (Linux Containers), recreating the directory structure of Android as a mountable loop image, while using native Linux kernel to execute applications. It makes use of Linux namespaces through LXC for isolation. Applications do not have any direct hardware access, all accesses are sent through the Anbox daemon.
It is open-source on Github.
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| Image Credit: Genymotion |
Genymotion is another popular android emulator and is often quoted as the best emulator on this platform. It lets you run Android Virtual Devices in the cloud and on your Linux desktop. Genymotion Virtual Devices are equipped with a large choice of widgets and sensors that can be manipulated to simulate any real-life situation or scenario: location, SMS & calls, network & baseband, etc.
Genymotion is compatible with Android SDK tools and Android Studio. Not just that, it is a multi-purpose platform that allows developers to test their websites and codes in different Android browsers directly from the Linux system.
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| Image Credit: android-x86.org |
Android-x86 makes everything possible for a Linux user by running Android emulation directly into the PC hardware. The OS is based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) with some modifications and improvements. Some components are developed by the project which allows it to run on PC architecture. For instance, some low-level components are replaced to better suit the platform, such as the kernel and HALs. The OS enables OpenGL ES hardware acceleration via Mesa if supported GPUs are detected, including Intel GMA, AMD's Radeon, Nvidia's chipsets (Nouveau), VMware (vmwgfx), and QEMU (virgl). Without a supported GPU, the OS can run in non-accelerated mode via software rendering.
It lets you mount the existing memory storage of the Android device directly to your emulator and also a default "BusyBox" debugging feature is available to locate bugs on applications.
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| Image Credit: ARChon |
ARChon is a unique type of Android emulator that lets you run android by utilizing Google Chrome's powerful runtime and then hitches the emulation compound directly into it.
ARChon runtime lets you run an unlimited number of Android APKs created with ChromeOS-app on Chrome OS and across any desktop platform that supports Chrome. It runs on any kernel version. Developers can quickly re-build their application and run it on their Linux machine.
It is an excellent choice if you wish to run the emulator without using any virtual machines.
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| Image Credit: BlessOS |
BlissOS is a powerful open-source emulator that lets the user run their favorite Android application as System Software on Linux Machines. It offers several customized opportunities to the developers to modify the look and feel of the emulator.
Bliss OS comes with a variety of added features for compatibility with ARM/ARM64 Apps and support for Widewine L3 DRM to play Netflix & Amazon Prime videos. As well as added configurations for gamepads and profiles for Tincore Keymapper, allowing users to game like never before.
