Felicitas Pojtinger 🌅I've been using a #HarmonyOS device for the past few days and it's def. made me re-evaluate my relationship with Android app emulation
For those who might not know, HarmonyOS is Huawei's new non-Linux OS. Think iOS, China edition. The UX is really great so far, and it's miles and miles ahead in "smoothness" compared to what any Android phone today feels like (and I'm on a low-end device, the Nova 15, which sells for ~$400 US in the mainland right now). I might even say it feels a little more fluent than an iPhone!
Anyways, if you're in Vancouver and would like to try it, please lmk. But now back to the Android emulation. My previous experiences with that were these:
1) Anbox (a long time ago)
2) Waydroid on #GNOME mobile and phosh via #postmarketOS
3) SailfishOS's Android emulation layer
All of those ... well I really didn't like them. Apps don't feel "native" at all, stuff like camera access and so on was really janky, "share to" targets don't work etc. and worst of all the way you get apps sucks
On HarmonyOS it's very different. Native HarmonyOS apps (developed with the OpenHarmony SDK, which is kind of like AOSP except targeting more kernels than just Linux) feel as nice as iOS apps, and they are fully responsive/adaptive from the start. They have the rubberband scroll, great consistency across the board, and all in all feel a lot like what I imagine #GNOME apps could feel like in a few years.
But there is a catch: Most if not all apps only work in the Chinese mainland. While that's exactly what I need rn (really just Alipay and WeChat/Weixin Pay) it makes the phone essentially a drawer/collection item outside of the mainland. But guess what - turns out that's actually not the case because damn is the Android emulation on HarmonyOS great!
You just head to the Huawei AppGallery and install "EasyAbroad". It's also inbuilt as "DroidTong" directly, but I'll use the first one because it feels nicer to use. Anyways, you open up that app, and it shows you a selector of countries. You select the country you're heading to for vacation or work, and it shows you the top 10 apps on the PlayStore for you to install.
First of all, that's great UX IMHO. Stuff that's absolutlely essential in the US (Uber and Google Maps, for example) show up on top. Anything else you can search for in the app directly. It seems to use microG or something under the hood and probably Play Store APIs. Either way, it works incredibly well.
Once you install an app it shows up on your home screen and if you didn't know it's an Android app from a small indicator on the app icon you'd never know. They open instantly, the correct (system/HarmonyOS) keyboard shows up, share menus open the HarmonyOS keyboard, and if I say want to attach an image on my Mastodon post that actually shows me the photos I took on the system. Even the international version of WeChat - mini apps, transit cards. payment and all - just work out of the box.
If everything weren't so smooth I'd never know those apps weren't native apps! It's really neat. Now, as you probably expect, payment apps/anything requiring SafetyNet doesn't work as is expected. Thankfully nobody here in China uses that. Ironically, mobile #Linux as a result is already a viable platform in China today. In Canada and Europe I'd miss my contactless payments I think, although there is a native HarmonyOS Wallet (Huawei Wallet) that I think would work there as well.
So, in total, three things:
1) Make Android app emulation _and_ the UX od installing Android apps good enough/fully transparent and even completely new, non-Linux platforms suddenly become viable for daily life
2) SafetyNet and remote attestation is IMHO the biggest hindrance to digital sovereignty on #Linux and #GNOME mobile right now, and we as citzens of places other than the US need to fix this with regulation
3) (see next post)
3) If you're in mainland China there is now an excellent, fully sovereign mobile ecosystem at your disposal that's arguably better than anything else I've used. I think in the future I'll point to this ecosystem as an actually existing example of how digitally sovereign ecosystems can not only be ... yk ... liberating from US sanctions, but also be arguably better from a UX perspective.
Anyways, now I'm back on tourist duty, there is a mountain in front of me that I really want to hike up!