Using Waydroid on the Raspberry Pi to Run Android Apps

In this project, we will show you how to use Waydroid on a Raspberry Pi to run Android Apps.

Waydroid is a container-based approach for running Android apps on a Linux-powered device such as the Raspberry Pi. This container approach allows the Waydroid to run a full Android operating system alongside your main operating system.

The most significant advantage of this method is that you can run an Android app as if it were a native Linux application. Waydroid seamlessly maps the Linux namespace to their Android equivalents while giving it full access to your Raspberry Pi’s hardware.

With this software, you can continue to use Raspberry Pi OS while still being able to install a huge range of Android apps. You can even use this to run the Plex media player, Amazon Prime Video, and more.

The performance is pretty solid, and you don’t seeem to lose any performance by using Waydroid over running Android as your main operating system.

While you can always use an Android operating system on your Raspberry Pi as your primary OS thanks to LineageOS or EmteriaOS, we find Waydroid to be nice to use and less problematic than those other solutions

Equipment

Below is a list of equipment we used when running Waydroid on our Raspberry Pi.

Optional

Raspberry Pi Case ( Amazon | SunFounder )
USB Mouse ( Amazon | SunFounder )
USB Keyboard ( Amazon | SunFounder )
HDMI Cable ( Amazon | SunFounder )

This tutorial was tested on a Raspberry Pi 5 running Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm (64-bit).

Installing and Setting up Waydroid on the Raspberry Pi

In the following sections, we will walk you through the installation and setup of Waydroid on your Raspberry Pi.

We will also show you how to get the Google Play Store working through Waydroid, as it’s one of the easier ways to install additional Android apps.

While this process has numerous steps, they should be relatively easy to follow. A couple of things to note before you begin:

First is that Waydroid requires Wayland to operate. You can proceed if you are using a Raspberry Pi 4 or newer and running Bookworm or newer.

Second, you must run a version of Raspberry Pi OS with a desktop interface. Using the terminal version of Pi OS is a no-go for this guide.

Getting your Pi Ready

1. Before setting up Waydroid on our Raspberry Pi, we must ensure a few things are set up beforehand

Our first task is to update the package list cache and upgrade any out-of-date packages by running the following two commands.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y

2. Your next step is to install the “curl” and “lsb-release” packages by running the following command.

We will use these packages when we set up the Waydroid package repository later in the guide.

sudo apt install curl lsb-release

3. If you are following this tutorial on a Raspberry Pi 5 or newer, you may need to change the kernel page size to 4k rather than the default 16k. Waydroid doesn’t play nice with the larger page size.

We have a guide that covers changing the page size on a Raspberry Pi.

https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-page-size/

4. Your next step requires us to enable a kernel feature called “pressure stall information” or “psi” for short. Waydroid requires this information to function properly.

To enable this functionality on our Raspberry Pi, we must modify the “cmdline.txt” file by using the following command.

sudo nano /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt

5. Within this file, you will see a super long line. Add the following to the end of it. You will want to add a space before specifying this value.

psi=1

6. After making this change, save and quit by pressing CTRL + X, Y, and then ENTER.

7. For this change to take effect, you must restart your Raspberry Pi. When it boots again, your Pi should now be able to get the pressure stall information and have the page correctly sized.

sudo reboot

Verifying your Settings

8. The first setting we will verify is where the pressure information has been enabled.

You can check this using the ls command to list the “/proc/pressure” directory.

ls /proc/pressure

If everything has worked correctly, you should see three directories listed.

cpu  io  memory

9. The next thing we will want to do is verify that the page size is set to 4k. As mentioned earlier, Waydroid won’t function properly with larger page sizes.

You can verify the page size by running the following command.

getconf PAGESIZE

If you get the following result, then you are ready to go.

Adding the Waydroid Package Repository

10. To make installing Waydroid easier on our Raspberry Pi, we will add their official package repository.

The first part of this process is to save the GPG key for this repository to your Pi. This key is a way for the apt package manager to verify the packages it downloads.

sudo curl -Sf https://repo.waydro.id/waydroid.gpg --output /usr/share/keyrings/waydroid.gpg

11. Next, you will want to add the Waydroid repository to your package sources using the command below. This is where we utilize the “lsb-release” package we installed earlier.

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/waydroid.gpg] https://repo.waydro.id/ $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/waydroid.list

12. As we changed the available repositories, you will want to update the package list cache by running the command below.

sudo apt update

Installing Waydroid on the Raspberry Pi

13. Finally, at this point, all we need to do to install Waydroid onto our Raspberry Pi is to run the following command.

This process shouldn’t take very long, but we will still need to complete some additional steps before using Waydroid.

sudo apt install waydroid

14. Once the Waydroid package has been installed, we need to initialize it by running the command below.

Waydroid will install and download a modified version of the Lineage operating system, which will run within its container. This can take longer to complete as the operating system is downloaded from Sourceforge.

Using the “-s GAPPS” option tells Waydroid that it should install a version of Lineage with the Google Applications pre-installed. If you don’t want or need Google Apps remove this option,

sudo waydroid init -s GAPPS

First Run of Waydroid

14. Waydroid won’t function properly right off the bat on your Raspberry Pi due to issues with the Wayland compositor the operating system uses.

To launch Wayland, open the start menu by clicking the Raspberry icon in the top-left corner.

15. With the start menu open, hover over “Other” (1.), and click the “Waydroid” option (2.).

16. Due to a problem with the compositor, you will now be greeted with a black screen. Luckily, we can work around this issue.

Your next step is to open the terminal by clicking the terminal icon.

Open terminal to fix Waydroid Black Screen issue on the Raspberry Pi

17. With the terminal now open, you can use the following command to set the “multi_windows” option to true. This avoids Waydroid trying to use the functionality missing from the Raspberry Pi’s implementation of Wayfire.

waydroid prop set persist.waydroid.multi_windows true

18. Once this setting has been changed, you will want to restart your Raspberry Pi for it to properly take effect.

sudo reboot

Launching your First Android App on the Raspberry Pi using Waydroid

19. Once your Raspberry Pi has rebooted, reopen the start menu.

You should see that there is now an option labeled “Waydroid“. Hover over this option to see a list of Android applications you can launch.

For this example, let us start the Clock application to see that everything works properly.

Launch Android App using Waydroid on the Raspberry Pi

20. We now have the Android Clock application running on our Raspberry Pi, thanks to Waydroid.

Android Clock app running on a Raspberry Pi

Certifying your Raspberry Pi Waydroid Installation to Run Google Apps

21. Since your Raspberry Pi’s Waydroid installation is not a certified Google device, you must register it yourself. This requires us to run a few commands to get the ID of our installation.

Luckily for us, Waydroid makes accessing its shell as simple as using the following command.

sudo waydroid shell

22. With the Waydroid shell now open, run the following command within the terminal to grab the ID of your Android installation.

ANDROID_RUNTIME_ROOT=/apex/com.android.runtime ANDROID_DATA=/data ANDROID_TZDATA_ROOT=/apex/com.android.tzdata ANDROID_I18N_ROOT=/apex/com.android.i18n sqlite3 /data/data/com.google.android.gsf/databases/gservices.db "select * from main where name = \"android_id\";"

After running the command above, you should see the following output to the terminal. The value you want is directly after the pipe symbol (|).

android_id|37128187XXXXXXXXXXX

Taking our example, we will use the following ID in the next step.

37128187XXXXXXXXXXX

23. In your favorite web browser, you will want to go to the following address. This page will allow you to authenticate your Waydroid installation with Google using the ID we got in the previous step.

https://www.google.com/android/uncertified

With the page now open, type in your ID (1.) and then click the “Register” button (2.).

Certify Raspberry Pi Android ID with Google

24. Before following this next step, you will want to wait a couple of minutes for your Android ID to propagate through Google’s servers.

After waiting a bit, run the command below to restart the Waydroid container.

sudo waydroid container restart

25. Now, you should be able to log in and use the Google Play Store to install Android apps onto your Raspberry Pi.

26. Below you can see that we have used Google Play to install the official Plex app onto our Raspberry Pi.

We can now use this to stream media from our Plex server. It is one of the best ways to watch your Plex media on a Raspberry Pi, but it may still struggle with some 4k media.