In a new development, to attract more users and provide a better experience, UBports has announced the inauguration of Project Anbox (short for Android-in-a-Box). Anbox will be a feature on Ubuntu Touch for running Android apps as per the need of the users. During the next few weeks, UBports will release a pre-alpha version of Anbox and provide setup instructions.
For those who don’t know, Anbox ensures that one can run Android apps on a Linux distro using a container-based approach for maximum security and performance. This approach needs lesser resources than emulating complete Android kernel.
This approach makes sense as there are tons of apps that aren’t available on Ubuntu Touch platform. Instead of trying something new to lure app developers to write apps for Ubuntu Touch platform, adding the support for Android apps is a better option, as per the announcement post.
Anbox is already available in pre-alpha stage for Ubuntu desktop and it’ll be soon added as an optional feature to Ubuntu Touch.
Things are looking pretty exciting when it comes to the development of Linux mobile operating systems and Android alternatives. In recent months, we’ve read about postmarketOS, Librem 5 smartphone, eelo, etc., and it looks like 2018 is going to be pretty exciting in this regard.
What are your thoughts? Will 2018 give us a solid Android-alternative?
