Waydroid, the software for running Android OS and Android apps on Linux Desktop, released new 1.6.0 version few days ago.
As you may know, Waydroid is a free open-source Python written application that uses a container-based approach to boot a full Android system (LineageOS by default) on regular Linux system.
The new Waydroid release now hide the system apps (e.g., Files, Contacts, Calculator, Music, and Camera) by default, as your Linux desktop may have apps with same names, to avoid duplicate app names in your Linux Desktop’s application launcher.
However, the manually installed Android apps are still visible, and user may edit the corresponding .desktop files under .local/share/applications directory and add NoDisplay=true option to hide them.
And, for those who want to hide all Android app icons from Desktop’s app launcher, then run the command below will do the trick for all current apps.
for file in $HOME/.local/share/applications/waydroid.*.desktop; do desktop-file-edit --set-key=NoDisplay --set-value=true $file; done
According to the release note, Waydroid 1.6.0 now will always show the main launcher after enabling multi-windows mode. And, it shows “Stop Waydroid” and “Initialize Waydroid” options when you right-clicking on main app icon, which can be useful to restart session or switch Android OS type to either minimal or with Google Services/Gapps.
Since the release, ADB will no longer auto-connect on session start. To install apps from Linux host, transfer files, debugging, or run shell commands, user needs to first run waydroid adb connect command manually to connect ADB, and provide authorization on the Android side.
This version also introduced new notification manager, allowing to forward Android notifications to DBUS.
It however requires updating the Android system image to a compatible version, and needs python-gbinder >= 1.3.0 or it will crash when receiving a notification with a picture. And, in my test with default LineageOS image, the feature seems not working!
The release also include new waydroid bugreport command to gather logs. It’s useful for reporting bugs, as you may reproduce your problem while running the command and send the log as bug report.
Other changes include
- Rotate and trim waydroid.log file at 5MB.
- Add new
waydroidcommand with no arguments, as alias forwaydroid show-full-ui. - And other miscellaneous improvements.
How to Install Waydroid
Waydroid has been made into Fedora and Arch etc Linux repositories. And, it provides an official apt repository contains native .deb packages for Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, 25.10, Debian 12, 13 and Unstable.
And, I’ve written about how to install and setup Waydroid in Ubuntu, though it’s still at the last v1.5.4 at the moment of writing.
