I can understand how he ended up with that kind of accusatory tone. Existing solutions either come with severe compatibility issues(official Emulator, QEMU, etc.), or vaporwares with great demos(Project Astoria) or are really sketchy borderline malwares(rest of it - my presumptions) that does wonders.

Not just borderline. Most of the ones that can feasibly run a game for example are basically real malware.

Do you mind elaborating on this? Is it just because the use case turns into something like app install fraud?

It's everything from a mix of cryptominers being deployed quietly (since of course anyone installing these will have a low end or better GPU), app install fraud, review fraud, Play token theft, spyware-tier telemetry. Even on the ones that don't install anything bad at all, they tend to auto-install the lowest common denominator apps via advertisements or paid placement that then have their own absurdist SDKs or whatever for data collection and mining.

Pretty much any of the closed source emulators that can feasibly run games (i.e., be horribly abused en masse for botting games) are festering piles of crap.

Another super common thing in those low tier trash apps is using your computer as a proxy ala Hola. Pay-per-install for using you to run stolen card traffic.

I can run most games on the Android Studio emulator without much of an issue, though it takes a higher mid-tier system to do it.

Which games? I don't mean like Fruit Ninja or Candy Crush, but the games that people actively bot or abuse will have a ton of ridiculous bullshit (checking anti-root, safetynet, borderline malware or malware-esque SDKs that exfiltrate huge amounts of data)

You're right, probably nothing that would be the target of bots like that, so I don't know how well those would work.

I play a few games my kids got me addicted to, Williams Pinball, and miscellaneous niche games. They run fine. But I haven't tried some of the popular MMOs or games where farming is basically the point.

THis guy wants to run containers of Android games, such as the various Pay to Win Machine Zone games (they are just one example).

I played one of these once (some Final Fantasy thing) and the amount of manipulative social engineering, dopamine triggering sidegames, and manipulation by devs or employed super-players to "mix things up" to try to provoke people to fork over money was appalling.

Thankfully I used almost no money, I paid up for one or two things to see if they would be worth it (they weren't) before I could fully recognize the money extraction treadmill they were trying to get you one.

The games are a fascinating example of hyperinflation too.

> The games are a fascinating example of hyperinflation too.

Can you elaborate on what's fascinating?

Aside from the social engineering aspect of constantly undermining the value of "currency" such as "gold" or resources like "food", etc.

The game devs have complete control over the value of things be it buildings, soldiers, items, etc. The ability to constantly release new tiers/soldiers/etc that instantly devalue previous invested time and work all in service to wring more real-world money from addicts...

Of course once too many new shiny things are released, suddenly the climb/intro for new players is too high.

So suddenly, new players are given far more of the original "currency" of gold and resource to skip past the beginning steps so they can come within shouting distance to where investing money would keep them alive.

Well, it's kind of like a perverse fiat currency and a central government with the power to impose regulations and print currency at will.

The fact that the "central government" started printing money / resources once several more tiers of buildings/soldiers/defenses were introduced devalued all that previous investment and work to startling degrees.

To me it was reminiscent of fiat currency and hyperinflation due to printing money.

Just looking for the delta between this and anbox free/anbox cloud/genynotion cloud. No quams about paying for it honestly, just inquiring if any of these formerly paid-only (or build it yourself) features are being offered in the open here.

From what I understand this is aimed only at ARM, so there's no emulation. This is therefore targeting Linux phones, but not Linux on desktop (which is usually run on x86).

From what I saw on docs, it seemed to be agnostic to host linux architecture (x86 or arm host), but it did say (on the desktop guide):

> The apk files you will sometimes find on the internet tend to only have arm support, and will therefore not work on x86_64.

Suggesting that they don't provide cross-abi compatability. If/when they move to Android 11 as the underlying image - it has both x86 and arm translations built into the packaged abi. I suspect that it will be on the user to install any abi translation packages (libhoudini for example) in order to get arm apk's to run on x86 host without qemu.

That's one way to look at it. Another is that we have this beautiful open source commons that most devs make use of and we would like it to be richer.

Did they edit their comment after your reply? I'm not seeing aspects you refer to (esp the time/skill point)

agreed