Engineers at Google started work on a new Terminal app for Android a couple of weeks ago. This Terminal app is part of the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and contains a WebView that connects to a Linux virtual machine via a local IP address, allowing you to run Linux commands from the Android host. Initially, you had to manually enable this Terminal app using a shell command and then configure the Linux VM yourself. However, in recent days, Google began work on integrating the Terminal app into Android as well as turning it into an all-in-one app for running a Linux distro in a VM.
↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority
There already are a variety of ways to do this today, but having it as a supported feature implemented by Google is very welcome. This is also going to greatly increase the number of spammy articles and lazy YouTube videos telling you how to “run Ubuntu on your phone”, which I’m not particularly looking forward to.
Don’t worry, Google will send this feature to graveyard in a year. Two at most.
That’s cool, but for most stuff Termux is good enough and unless it allows you to run GUI apps, I don’t think I would give it much use. There are apps and games I’d love to use on android, even if I had to get external keyboard and mouse, but they’re all GUI.
I don’t know that the situation with termux is sustainable on android given google’s insistence on requiring new api levels to be restricted. The termux API level has already been banned from the google app store, and it’s probably only a matter of time before it gets removed from all official android devices…
https://www.reddit.com/r/termux/comments/zu8ets/do_not_install_termux_from_play_store/
Once this happens, termux will be no more. Users may be forced to use google’s linux in a VM solution that’s being proposed in the article.
That will be cool
I usually have to run termux to get a terminal and Linux environment
Hoply they will include a default terminal app as well
They’ll probably use the same codebase for the default terminal they do on ChromeOS. It’s not fancy but it works.
runciblebatleth,
I suspect it’s just going to be linux in a VM without giving owners the ability to use linux tools to access android itself. That sucks for me because termux doesn’t impose those limitations. One of the ways that I benefit from running linux is being able to SSH into all my linux devices from my computer, even phones, but it looks like google’s linux support may be limited to a VM with the host environment being off limits. If so, it relegates linux tooling to 2nd class status since it can’t be used outside of a VM, which defeats the purpose for those of us who want linux tools to be available on android.
I wouldn’t complain if the linux environment is in addition to shells like termux. But I’ll be really annoyed if this linux VM is the precursor to google officially killing termux-like power shells on android as it will be a net loss for me.