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Waydroid User Guide

Waydroid is an Android container environment based on Wayland. It allows you to run Android apps on the Dragon Q8B.

Waydroid runs a complete Android system in a container and integrates with the Linux desktop, so Android apps can run like native applications.

Prerequisites

Waydroid only works under a Wayland session. You can check your current session type with the following command.

radxa@dragon-q8b$
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

If the output is wayland, your current session is Wayland and you can run Waydroid.

If the output is not wayland, select the GNOME (Wayland) session (avoid Xorg) from the login screen and log in again.

Install Waydroid

Add the Waydroid repository

Add the official Waydroid repository.

radxa@dragon-q8b$
curl -s https://repo.waydro.id | sudo bash

Install Waydroid

radxa@dragon-q8b$
sudo apt update
sudo apt install waydroid -y

PSI kernel parameter

Add the PSI kernel parameter.

Edit boot parameters

radxa@dragon-q8b$
sudo cp /etc/kernel/cmdline /etc/kernel/cmdline.bak
grep -q 'psi=1' /etc/kernel/cmdline || sudo sed -i 's/$/ psi=1/' /etc/kernel/cmdline

Update boot entry

radxa@dragon-q8b$
sudo kernel-install add $(uname -r) /boot/vmlinuz-$(uname -r)

Finally, reboot the system.

radxa@dragon-q8b$
sudo reboot

Initialize Waydroid

Before first use, you need to initialize Waydroid. You can click the Waydroid icon or run the command below in a terminal.

radxa@dragon-q8b$
sudo waydroid init

Initialization will automatically download system.img and vendor.img.

Manually initialize Waydroid

If automatic initialization fails or downloads are very slow, you can manually download the system/vendor archives and extract them to /etc/waydroid-extra/images.

  • Get the download URL

Copy the download URL from the JSON files below. The dates of system.img and vendor.img should match; otherwise apps may crash.

system.img

vendor.img

  • Extract the image archives

Open a terminal, go to the directory where you downloaded the files, and extract the system/vendor archives to /etc/waydroid-extra/images.

radxa@dragon-q8b$
sudo mkdir -p /etc/waydroid-extra/images
sudo unzip lineage-*-system.zip -d /etc/waydroid-extra/images
sudo unzip lineage-*-vendor.zip -d /etc/waydroid-extra/images
rm lineage-*-system.zip lineage-*-vendor.zip
  • Re-initialize Waydroid
radxa@dragon-q8b$
sudo waydroid init -f

Start Waydroid

After initialization, start the Waydroid container service.

radxa@dragon-q8b$
sudo systemctl enable --now waydroid-container

Then start the Waydroid session and open the UI.

radxa@dragon-q8b$
waydroid session start
waydroid show-full-ui

Install Android apps

Open a terminal, change to the directory that contains the APK, and install it with the command below.

radxa@dragon-q8b$
waydroid app install example-app.apk

After installation, the app will appear in your application menu.

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