Is app support for Android x86 fading away?

[Curtis Cooper]

I have recently come back to the Android x86 ecosystem and noticed that apps and games that previously were working are no longer working.  I know this is a vague question and would need specific logs for anyone to diagnose the issue, but I was curious if other users are finding the same thing?  It seems like less apps in the Google Play store are supporting the x86 architecture, causing the apps to crash immediately when launching on Android x86.

Any tips appreciated.

Thanks!

[Juuso Pikkarainen]

I think the problem is in the os. If app isnt compatible for android x86, it will not show up in play store.

[Povilas Staniulis]

On 2020-07-28 20:11, Juuso Pikkarainen wrote:
> I think the problem is in the os. If app isnt compatible for android x86, it will not show up in play store.

Android x86 has support for ARM emulation through Houdini.

[Prajna Sariputra]

I believe part of the problem could be that more apps are providing 64 bit ARM versions only, while newer Android-x86 versions currently only support emulating 32 bit ARM.

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[Chih-Wei Huang]

Prajna Sariputra <put...@gmail.com> 於 2020年7月29日 週三 上午6:29寫道：

>
> I believe part of the problem could be that more apps are providing 64 bit ARM versions only, while newer Android-x86 versions currently only support emulating 32 bit ARM.

That would not be a problem since Android-x86 8.1 because
we don't claim to support arm64 arch.
That means the Play Store won't provide arm64 apps to us.
(that would be a problem to Android-x86 7.1 or older versions since
we claim to support arm64 but the emulation is relatively unstable)

Back to the original question. Make sure you have enabled
the nativebridge support from the Settings.

[Curtis Cooper]

Thanks for the information, I have now reinstalled the latest 9.0 release and enabled nativebridge and that has helped a lot with the issues I was seeing.

I originally had tried the 9.0 release, tested a few apps/games and had a lot of crashes, then downgraded to the 7.1-r4 release, saw similar crashes, tried the nativebridge option there but didn't notice much difference.  I hadn't tried nativebridge setting on 9.0-r2 until now.

[Tails Lol]

Yes it is because of arm 64 being mainstream now and Android x86 support arm 32bit compatibility.
Some games choose to not support x86 natively so they can't be emulated.

[LSS]

Sadly the currently situation is that many apps are gradually moving on to use some advanced instructions/optimizations that houdini cannot handle (some apps never had a native x86 version to begin with), causing the app (or certain feature) to crash on x86 devices (native code errors pointing at libhoudini, with tombstones generated). Not all app developers would explicitly announce the drop of support for x86 devices, as x86 is pretty much dead in Android ecosystem with very few active devices out there, so such move would have nearly zero impact.

It's not just Android-x86. It affected x86 phones like Asus Zenfone 2 as well. I got myself a Zenfone 2 around 2017 and was forced to move to a new device around 2018, as more and more apps (in Google Play Store) that I need to use stopped working on x86 due to breaking changes. It's still possible to look for a last known good version that worked on x86 on APK download sites like APKPure/APKMirror, but if the app explicitly requires an up-to-date version to be installed, there'd be no way to work around.

Back then I also noticed that some apps shipped an incomplete/wrong set of x86 libraries (which I suspect were being used only during internal testing) that would crash if installed directly. Such apps could be made to work if installed from terminal by explicitly stating to use armeabi (armeabi-v7a) architecture, and provided that the armeabi libraries don't use instructions/optimizations that would break on houdini.

[DDS Central]

x86 Android is very much alive in form of x86 Chromebooks. It is not going anywhere soon.

Problem with Houdini is that it comes with zero support from Intel. You simply install it and hope that it works. If it doesn't - there not much you can do.

There were some efforts from developers of Android x86 to provide a replacement for Houdini using qemu-user, but nothing usable was released to this day.

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