I’m wondering if anyone has experience emulating Android on Linux? I’m specifically looking to emulate an APK without running a full OS, if that’s possible.
I use GrapheneOS on my phone, but some apps mistakenly think the device is rooted, preventing me from logging into my accounts. So, I thought desktop emulation might be a good workaround.
I came across Waydroid, which looks promising, but it seems to offer a full OS experience—something I’m hoping to avoid. I’m just looking for a way to directly run the APK.
I haven’t played with Android emulation in a while but I believe just about any app that’s checking for ‘rooted’ devices is going to have the same issue running in a virtual environment.
FWIW most of them aren’t actually checking if the device is ‘rooted’ - instead, they are checking for compliance with various Google Play services and the various Attestation APIs - GrapheneOS provide their own as you can see there, but this doesn’t mean that all APKs will honour them, and most will still fail because they’re only interested in the API keys provided by a stock Android OS.
They just universally report as ‘rooted’ because it’s possible the developers don’t really care that much about why the app won’t run on a configuration they don’t officially support, it just has to not run, and one error message to rule them all is as good as any other .
That way they don’t have to worry about the possible ramifications of a user doing something silly like banking from a compromised device and having their accounts drained, then trying to blame it on the bank’s app for not being secure enough.
Well here’s the kicker, all banking, and finance apps work just fine on graphene but my smart garage app myQ is the only app that gives me grief at the moment.
They don’t even offer a web portal to sign in to, which is quite frustrating
To be fair, that’s the kind of app I’d be even more wary of, security wise - emptying my bank account is one thing and can likely be worked out administratively in the end, but a hypothetical bad actor being able to compromise an app that can be used to get into my actual physical property is a lot more ominous!
I can completely understand it being comprehensively locked down.
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