Waydroid: Android on X11 (and Wayland) with RK3588 ARM 64bits computer (aarch64) - 2025-08-10
Using Android on a Linux computer, especially on ARM 64bits (Also called Aarch64) where all appliations will work natively.
As XFCE still doesn't work (at least in my case with Wayland, and that's my prefered desktop, I still use X11. I want to use some Android application on my Desktop computer. However, Waydroid, the Android virtual machine for Linux is made for Wayland display (so the name Way(land) + (An)droid). Weston is of good help to make it working.
Update 2028-09-01, I managed to have XFCE4 working on Wayland on this hardware, probably due to recent XFCE updates. It use labwc as compositor, that depend itself on wlroots. Still have some limitation (keyboard forced to english, no mean to switch (keyboard and iBus should depend on labwc or wlroots layers), parameters not available at least on menus, no screensaver/locker, see also one of the XFCE4 author's blog entry for more details), so I will wrote a new article about some tweaks in this case
WARNING!! Waydroid start some components at root level, it may contains some Google ads/private data or NSA spies, that's probably better to use it on a VM or a system without sensitive content
If you have other Aarch64 hardware you can skip this, but in my case, I use since about 6 month now a Rockchip RK3588 based (ARM 64bits) Radxa ITX board as main computer There is relatively good management of Vulkan 1.4 and Zink since this summer in GIT version, a stable base is available in Mesa 25.2.0 since 2025-08-06) for the Mali-G610 MP4 GPU included in the SoC. the RK3588 NPU start to be managed by the Rocket driver since 2025-07-28 in mainline Mesa, will be available in this first state in following release of Mesa.
Table of Content
- Compilation of Mesa driver if needed in case of RK3588
- Run Waydroid on X11
- Waydroid in a window on Wayland
- Android reboot and network problem after resizing window
- Copy APK in the Waydroid directory
As XFCE still doesn't work (at least in my case with Wayland, and that's my prefered desktop, I still use X11. I want to use some Android application on my Desktop computer. However, Waydroid, the Android virtual machine for Linux is made for Wayland display (so the name Way(land) + (An)droid). Weston is of good help to make it working.
Update 2028-09-01, I managed to have XFCE4 working on Wayland on this hardware, probably due to recent XFCE updates. It use labwc as compositor, that depend itself on wlroots. Still have some limitation (keyboard forced to english, no mean to switch (keyboard and iBus should depend on labwc or wlroots layers), parameters not available at least on menus, no screensaver/locker, see also one of the XFCE4 author's blog entry for more details), so I will wrote a new article about some tweaks in this case
WARNING!! Waydroid start some components at root level, it may contains some Google ads/private data or NSA spies, that's probably better to use it on a VM or a system without sensitive content
If you have other Aarch64 hardware you can skip this, but in my case, I use since about 6 month now a Rockchip RK3588 based (ARM 64bits) Radxa ITX board as main computer There is relatively good management of Vulkan 1.4 and Zink since this summer in GIT version, a stable base is available in Mesa 25.2.0 since 2025-08-06) for the Mali-G610 MP4 GPU included in the SoC. the RK3588 NPU start to be managed by the Rocket driver since 2025-07-28 in mainline Mesa, will be available in this first state in following release of Mesa.
Table of Content
- Compilation of Mesa driver if needed in case of RK3588
- Run Waydroid on X11
- Waydroid in a window on Wayland
- Android reboot and network problem after resizing window
- Copy APK in the Waydroid directory