uDroid

Dedicated Android app to run Linux in Android.

Current feature support Area What is supported Linux installation Search uDroid and PRoot-Distro archives alongside official Docker Hub operating-system images. Choose a compatible OCI tag, review its architecture and compressed size, resume transfers, verify SHA-256 digests, and retain validated data across retries. Multiple systems Keep multiple distributions installed. Selecting an installed system opens its own status and controls page instead of immediately starting a terminal. Terminal Use the bundled Termux terminal emulator and persistent, service-owned PTY without installing Termux separately. Each terminal action targets the selected rootfs. Linux applications Discover freedesktop .desktop entries, launch graphical or terminal applications, publish dynamic shortcuts, and pin selected applications to the Android home screen. Embedded X11 Use the bundled Termux:X11 server and uDroid display surface without installing the separate Termux:X11 application. Keyboard, direct-pointer, trackpad-style, native multi-touch, and display settings are available inside uDroid. Desktop environments Detect installed X11 sessions from standard xsessions directories. Start, stop, or restart the selected desktop while uDroid reports which rootfs and desktop own DISPLAY :0. Compositing Enable or disable compositing for supported XFCE, Plasma, and MATE sessions, then apply the setting through a supervised desktop restart. GNOME is treated as compositor-required. Audio Play Linux audio through Android with an app-owned PulseAudio/OpenSL ES bridge. Enable microphone input per Linux system with Android runtime consent; guest traffic stays on authenticated device-local loopback.

Current limitations uDroid currently supervises one active Linux runtime and one X11 display, DISPLAY :0, at a time. Multiple distributions can remain installed, but their live desktop sessions are not concurrent. Desktop lifecycle support currently targets X11 sessions advertised through /usr/share/xsessions or /usr/local/share/xsessions. Wayland sessions are not launched. Compositor control is desktop-specific. LXQt and unknown/custom sessions are still launchable, but uDroid does not guess at a compositor switch when no safe standard adapter is known. PRoot provides the Linux userspace. It is not a virtual machine, does not provide a normal systemd/logind boot, and cannot reproduce every native Linux service or sandbox boundary. The embedded display is functional, but general-purpose GPU acceleration is not yet a supported app contract. Desktop responsiveness depends on the device, resolution, applications, and compositor choice. Background desktop recovery, multiple displays, and production-level desktop compatibility remain incomplete. Audio currently targets PulseAudio clients; direct ALSA-only applications may require a PulseAudio compatibility plugin.