- Android 16’s Linux Terminal can now run graphical Linux apps such as Doom.
- This is thanks to improvements like hardware acceleration support and a display server.
- These upgrades aren’t live yet in the most recent Android 16 beta, but they could arrive in a future release.
Google wants to turn Android into a full-fledged PC operating system, and to do so, it needs to get desktop-class programs running on it. The best way for Google to do that is to add support for running Linux apps on Android, much like it did with Chrome OS. That’s exactly the idea behind the Android Linux Terminal app that Google has been working on for the past several months. The current version of the Terminal app lacks support for running graphical apps, but that could change in an upcoming release of Android 16.
Android’s Linux Terminal is an all-in-one app that downloads, configures, runs, and interfaces with an instance of the Debian distribution running in a virtual machine. The app relies on the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF), a set of APIs that allow an Android host device to run other operating systems via virtualization. AVF is supported by many different devices from a variety of OEMs, with the noteworthy exception of Samsung.