Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu

An anonymous reader notes Ars Technica's report from the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona, where Canonical has unveiled a prototype Android execution environment that will allow Android applications to run on Ubuntu and "potentially other conventional Linux distributions." "Android uses the Linux kernel, but it isn't really a Linux platform. It offers its own totally unique environment that is built on Google's custom Java runtime. There is no glide path for porting conventional desktop Linux applications to Android. Similarly, Java applications that are written for Android can't run in regular Java virtual machine implementations or in standard Java ME environments. This makes Android a somewhat insular platform. Canonical is creating a specialized Android execution environment that could make it possible for Android applications to run on Ubuntu desktops in Xorg alongside regular Linux applications. The execution environment would function like a simulator, providing the infrastructure that is needed to make the applications run. Some technical details about the Android execution environment were presented by Canonical developer Michael Casadevall... They successfully compiled it against Ubuntu's libc instead of Android's custom libc and they are running it on a regular Ubuntu kernel."

Comments

Re:If I had the choice

[Flynsarmy]

Then you might be interested in this.

Re:Why?

[MichaelSmith]

Maybe so you can develop android applications on ubuntu.

Re:important lesson

[Darkness404]

Well, for starters they don't have a very good web browser. Sure, its trivial to install Opera Mobile, but both the iPhone OS, and Android come with decent browsers. Then they don't have support for captive touchscreens (officially that is), then in my experience the UI is a mess (but thats just me), They don't have an app store and the one they do have lined up seems like it won't have very many apps (costs $100 for each app to be in the store per year). Then there is the general buggyness of it (hard resets everywhere, etc) in my experience battery life has suffered too (but having not ran a phone with 2 OSes on it I can't tell with certainty, but it sure seems less).