hi guys, today we're going to take a look at how to run Android inside of a container. Now, I've been doing a series of videos on how to run old Tech inside of containers, and I'm taking a look at how to run things like Windows 98, Windows XP, DOS. We even did old Gaming platforms like SNES and Atari and NES that you can run with RetroArch. Now, I did run one modern operating system; I put Mac OS in a container, and that was a little bit clunky, but it did work. And I've tried to do other more modern operating systems too. Now, the two that are kind of remaining are Chrome OS and Android. Now, my work in Chrome OS, I'm not real pleased with that one. It doesn't really work well at all, and so I'm probably going to put that on the back burner until it has a little bit better support for virtualization. Android, on the other hand, has had broad support for virtualization for quite some time, so there's a lot of different ways you can

run Android in a virtualized or emulated context. And of course, virtualization is where you build a virtual machine, and in that way, you can run an installed version of the operating system on virtual hardware. And then there's emulation, which is kind of like virtualization, but instead of running a full operating system, it's more of a pared-down operating system, but it still has a number of the same kind of features a full operating system would have. And this is what we typically use for software development. So, in my work, I'm trying to get Android working in a container. I went down the path of virtual machines first, and I really couldn't get that to work well in an x86 context in Docker because the support for more modern versions of Android just isn't there yet for virtual machines. And so, there's been some activity with an operating system called Bliss OS, which was a fork of Android 86, which is an older, more sunsetted project. I don't know that it has been deprecated yet, but it's not been updated in a while. But Bliss OS

forked that, and it's doing a lot of work around Android 10 and Android 11, but it doesn't have modern support for Android 12 or 13, which are the more commonly used versions of Android, at least in the last few years. So, with that in mind, I wanted to shift over to emulation, and that was widely supported a long time ago, and it still has a very vibrant community, even with more modern versions of Android, like Android 12. So, with the emulators that you get with the SDK for Android, you can get a virtual device up and running, and you can do that in a Docker container, and you can control it through a web browser, just like I've been doing with all of my other demos. So, I'm going to show you how to do that, and there's really nothing that I built to do this. I'm just going to show you the repository where this project lives, and then I'm just going to show you how to start it up and show you

how that you can have a functional Android device running inside of a Docker container simply by using these emulators that are available on Docker Hub. So I'm going to be running this in the Windows Subsystem for Linux or WSL, but this would work on a virtual machine or bare metal machine as well. It's pretty straightforward. So basically, what you need to do first is have QEMU up and running because this uses QEMU and KVM, which are basically some virtualization tools that are in the Linux context. So if you're running Ubuntu, these are really easy to install. So just run `apt-get install qemu-kvm` and do this as root, and this will install this particular set of packages. Now you can install these, and once it's done, it'll be enabled on your system, and you'll be able to use these packages. So the next thing that you'll want to do is get Docker installed. Now, if you have Docker installed, you can skip this step, of course, but it's pretty easy to do if

you've never installed Docker. It's just a script, so you can get the script by downloading it using curl. So, you run curl and point it to get dot dot com, and then you can output it to get dash docker.sh. And that's just a shell script. And then, to run that, you can just use the sh command to run the shell script. And that will download and install Docker. I've already installed Docker on my box, so if I do Docker dash V, you can see that I have a fairly recent build of this. So, you can check that if you just want to see if you have Docker already installed. And once you have Docker installed, you're ready to go. The next thing you need to do is just run the emulator using the docker run command. So, to show you the actual image that we're going to run, it's this one right here. It's Docker Android, and it's a really active repository on GitHub. So, you can see that it's getting commits and pull requests all the time. It's got several

thousand stars and a lot of different forks, and it's a very healthy repository. There's a lot of activity in this particular domain, so Docker Android is alive and well and will likely remain a very active project in the future. So you can see that you have some several different versions of Android that you can use. And so the way this works is you tell it what image you want to use, basically by just saying, I'm going to run this at version 13 or 12 or 11. And then you can use a command line parameter or environment variable that is to tell it which device you want to use. Now, of course, you can't run Android 13 on a Samsung Galaxy S10, but it basically uses the hardware specs for the screen resolution and other things, even though you might be running Android 13 but using the specs of this one's screen resolution and so on for the device that you're going to be emulating. So something to think about there. Any case, those are the two main parameters.

that you need. And the other thing that you might want to check is you look for this right here to make sure that KVM actually will work on your machine. But once you have those things, you are ready to run. So I'm just going to run the command here in my Docker context, and then I'm just going to open a browser and just poke around on the emulator inside of a Docker container. So to run this, what you need to do is run a Docker command that looks like this. So a couple of different parameters that we need to look at are one is the version that you want to use. So this is just the repository, but you use the tag on the image to tell it what version you're going to be using. So emulator 13. So this would be the most recent version of Android that is a more production version of Android. There's still some early releases for version next. The next one that you need is you'll need to put this flag on here. So you need to have device slash Dev slash KVM. Now this is

needed for Hardware acceleration, and it really won't work unless you have this enabled. So, this is going to basically expose the KVM that you installed on the machine that you're using for Docker to the docker container. And once you have that as part of the command line, there's a few other things that just impact the behavior. WebVNC enables the browser to connect to this, and that's why you need this port right here. There's also ports that you can use if you want to have ADB or other tools for debugging this particular environment. You can definitely use those, and those are useful for getting telemetry out of the app and also side-loading APKs into the Android device and different things like that. Now, the emulator devices, of course, the one that we looked at inside of the repo is the Samsung Galaxy S10, and that's just, like I said, emulating its hardware characteristics in terms of screen resolution and other similar things like that. But it's really not going to impact the overall performance of the emulator. So, once you have all of

these things set you can then run this. Now, there's other command line things that you can add to this that I didn't cover, but once you start this up, it's just going to start a container, and you can get had a list of starting containers by running Docker PS, and you can see that it's running right there. So, let's go open up our browser and point it to this particular container just to see this thing up and running. Once you have the emulator started with the docker command, then you can just point your browser to the IP address of your Linux contacts that you are running that in, and then use port 6080, which is the port that will connect you to novnc. You've seen me use novnc, so that's no surprise there, and you'll see that you have a virtual device up and running on this, and it's a fairly, he's got feature parity to a pretty modern version of Android. So, you can see that it has a lot of the Google apps already installed, and of course, you can

side load these if you want to use like ADB. You can sideload apks and so on to this guy. So I'm just going to launch Chrome here, and you can see that it has fairly decent performance in terms of acceleration and what have you. And so this is just a website that is running on this emulated device, and it's enables me to have a fairly fluid, fairly decent experience for doing this kind of emulation. Now, this particular emulation is good for a lot of different things. Now, of course, it's not going to be very practical for using Android on a day-to-day basis. Now, that's really not what this is for. But what this particular setup has been used for is for doing things like application testing. So application testing is a big deal if you want to be able to make apps and then test them using automation. Automation is useful in an environment like this, so I can use something like Appium, which is a suite that allows me to test mobile applications and mobile websites on an emulated device or

physical device, but an emulated device is a lot cheaper because I don't have to really pay for a physical device, and I can just use the emulated devices for the app testing. And then, if I can do those tests over and over and over again on the emulated device, then I can kind of graduate it to an actual physical device or what have you. But these are great for development and those kinds of tasks like that. So, there's a lot of cool things that you can do with emulators like this, and you can play with different versions of Android and different kinds of emulated devices as well. So, just something to consider. It's a great tool, and I will probably be using this for other kinds of demos in the future as I work with other kinds of things that are just kind of curiosities for me. So, if you like this content, please like the video, and of course, subscribe to the channel, and share it with your friends, and drop a comment in the comment section down below. I don't know that I'm gonna be doing a

whole lot more in terms of emulating old Tech inside of Docker containers or anything like that. If something crosses my mind, I might give it a shot, but I'm definitely going to be doing more work in the Docker context. There's, of course, some stuff that I'm going to be doing around things like Kubernetes and Edge Computing and other interests like that, especially in the context of AI and other things like that that are just interesting to me. So, pay attention to those, and I hope to see you on future videos. If you like this content, please consider subscribing to the channel by clicking on the Subscribe button. You can also like this content by clicking on the thumbs up or share this content with your friends and also comment in the comment section down below. You can also find me online at www.blaze.net or on Twitter at the one mule. And, as always, thanks for watching. [Music]

Run Android in a Docker Container!

Run Android in a Docker Container!

Scripts