It seems regular linux desktops can't run android apps even on Wayland?

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Wed, 22 Mar 2017 01:19:55 -0300 Lúcio Boari <lucboari at gmail.com> said:

> Hello I'm Lúcio. I'm not a programmer so maybe what I am discussing here is
> somehow erroneous. Today I was wondering why it's not possible to have
> Android apps running natively on a Linux desktop since Android runs atop
> the Linux Kernel and it is pretty much compatible with the x86
> architecture, and since Google has always open sourced their code. I made
> some research and found this page
> <http://www.jlekstrand.net/jason/projects/wayland/wayland-android/>which
> explains basically a triple layered EGL context will always exist if you
> try to attach the Android's display server on Wayland, and very few drivers
> are capable of handling this.
> 
> Why does the same thing doesn't happen with Xwayland? Isn't it the same
> kind of problem? It is a pity things are this way because if Android apps
> were compatible with the standard linux system there would be a certain
> advantage in shipping a standard Linux distro on smartphones and tablets
> over the plain Android System to not talk about regular computers which
> would gain a huge amount of applications.
> 
> I hope you Wayland developers could make a way to attach Androrid
> applications on Wayland, but if there's really no good way to do this
> currently... If there is I'd like to know why there's apparently no one
> interested to make such a thing to happen...

Android is NOT an open OS. Not these days. Google very much push apps to RELY
on Google Play Services and "upgrade" from old Android API's. All development
of core Android API's (e.g. location API) stopped and all future additions
happen to Google Play Services which is proprietary, closed and specific to
Google.

Just because Android and "Desktop/Server Linux" (aka GNU/Linux - until Android
I never though I'd use this term) share the same kernel does not mean that are
anything alike further up the stack. They are vastly different with different
libc's and just about everything higher up being different.

So Android apps are NOT compatible with GNU/Linx. Android is a completely
different OS that just shares ONLY the kernel and nothing more worth talking
about. Because it is a foreign OS possibly even more so than iOS or OSX would
be (but less than Windows), no one really is going to chase this moving target
that ever becomes more and more closed over time.

Given that ... any EGL stack talk and Wayland is kind of moot. :)

-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler)    raster at rasterman.com