Drion, from the Estonian AOSP company Actinis, runs Android apps and games directly on Linux. It is not an emulator, a container of a full Android system, or a VM. Actinis describes it as “a Wine-like Android compatibility platform”: apps keep the contracts they expect (Binder, activities, services, intents, notifications), the system side is reimplemented in Rust, and a hosted ART runs the APK. Each app is a sandboxed Linux process with its own Wayland window, and gets host audio, clipboard and notifications.
Drion’s developers have confirmed to us that its arm64-to-x86_64 translation uses
Digitalis. On an x86_64 machine, an arm64-only Android app runs through Drion’s Native
Bridge path, and Digitalis executes that app’s native code. The work has flowed back
upstream too: the opt-in glibc-host-thread-id-handoff runtime flag, which lets the
translator find each thread’s guest state when the host C library is glibc rather than
bionic, came from the Drion project (pull request;
see runtime flags).
What Actinis has shown so far
Actinis introduced Drion on 29 July with a Steam Deck, a Steam Machine, Ubuntu Touch and the Linux desktop as targets, and a short pitch:
No full Android OS. No Waydroid. No VM. Deep host integration. Drion. Android apps, Linux-shaped. Coming this year.
Since then they have posted apps running as ordinary desktop windows:
- Teamfight Tactics, the latest release, on Linux “even with an Nvidia GPU” (29 August).
- YouTube playing a 4K HDR video, and YouTube Music, which “consumes fewer resources than the YTM Electron app” (13 August, 13 August).
- Discord, working “after a few WebView fixes” (14 August).
They are also asking what to bring first: which Android apps Steam Deck owners and Ubuntu Touch users want most, and on Ubuntu Touch they have shown the latest Android Firefox under test on 24.04-2.0.
A note on where Digitalis fits: translation is only needed where the CPU differs. On x86_64 hosts such as the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine and ordinary PCs, arm64-only apps rely on it. On arm64 hardware such as Ubuntu Touch phones, Android’s arm64 code runs natively and Drion needs no translator.
Help test the alpha
Actinis is starting a closed alpha. From their announcement:
The alpha version will be distributed as a Flatpak package. Wayland is required.
To sign up, email alpha@actinis.io or send a DM to @ActinisHQ. For anything else, Actinis is at contact@actinis.io.
As with the Bass OS build, Drion is Actinis’ product, not ours, and we have not run it. Questions about Drion go to them first. If a problem comes down to arm64 translation, that part is ours, and we would like to hear about it.
- Drion: actinis.io/drion
- Actinis on X: @ActinisHQ
- Digitalis source: github.com/DigitalisX64