Jonas Dressler from the GNOME project, developing the GNOME Shell edition for mobile devices, has published developments that allow the Aliendalvik environment (AppSupport) to run in standard Linux distributions. Aliendalvik serves as a layer for the Sailfish mobile platform, enabling the execution of applications written for the Android platform. During the reverse engineering of Aliendalvik, patches for the Mutter compositing server, scripts, and bindings over the sound server and input system were prepared, necessary for running Aliendalvik outside of the Sailfish platform environment.
Aliendalvik's launch was demonstrated on the Pinephone Pro and Oneplus 6 smartphones, where it was installed in Arch Linux with the GNOME Mobile shell. It is noted that Aliendalvik interacts with the Sailfish user environment using standard Freedesktop APIs; for example, notifications are sent via the DBus interface org.freedesktop.Notification, and the MPRIS protocol is used to manage media players. Each running Android application is displayed using a separate Wayland surface within its own window, and the input is organized using the Wayland 'text-input' protocol.
The Aliendalvik environment is launched using LXC container isolation tools, and the components for integration with the host system are built for the ARM64 architecture and developed with Qt. Unlike the similar Waydroid project, which also runs the Android environment in a container, Aliendalvik provides closer integration with the host system; for instance, Android applications open in regular windows, contact book synchronization is supported, and the Sailfish on-screen keyboard is used.
The Sailfish system environment is based on the Mer project (which has been developing as part of Sailfish since April 2019) and packages from the Mer distribution Nemo. The environment utilizes systemd, DBus, RPM, PackageKit, PulseAudio, BlueZ, Wayland, and Qt. The compositing server lipstick is built on QtCompositor. Firejail is used for application isolation. ConnMan is employed for managing network connections, and oFono serves as the phone stack.
Source: opennet.ru
