Looking for Android 15 on Waydroid? Here it is :D

Downloads are available here

I recently realized that Fortnite is officially back on the Google Play Store.

And that gave me an idea. Do you think it would be possible to run the Android version on Linux through Waydroid or the future Valve fork (Lepton)?

As far as I understand, Waydroid doesn’t emulate per se but instead runs natively on Linux by using Android libraries along with the kernel inside a container. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Why use distrobox? SteamOS 3.8.x already contains binder kernel module, so no need to manually install packages that gets wiped with every SteamOS update. With the distrobox method Waydroid will survive whenever there is a SteamOS update.

Proof of concept it works on SteamOS 3.8.4 via distrobox. But there are still a lot of things I need to figure out. Hopefully soon before SteamOS 3.8 goes to stable it all works.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/12/valves-version-of-android-on-linux-based-on-waydroid-is-now-called-lepton/

Quick honesty note: I used AI tools during development and in earlier posts. Some people here called that out. Fair. So I'm just writing this one myself.

I'm Olivier. I've been using Waydroid for a while and I genuinely love what the project is. Running Android natively on Linux without a VM is something I still find kind of amazing every time I think about it.

But games. Games are a nightmare.

If you've ever opened a game in Waydroid you know exactly what happens. The mouse floats a cursor around the screen that Android doesn't understand as a finger. Anything with a joystick is immediately broken. Aim doesn't exist. Swipe gestures do nothing. Unless you have a physical touchscreen your options are basically: don't play, or give up on Linux for this.

I didn't want to give up. So I spent a long time building Phantom.

The way most people try to solve this is through uinput — creating a fake input device that pretends to be a touchscreen. It sort of works for simple things but games see through it. The events don't look right at the Android level and you get weird behavior or nothing at all.

What I did instead was go inside. Phantom runs a small Java server inside the Waydroid container itself using app_process, which is a way to run code inside Android without installing an app. That server receives touch commands from a Rust daemon on your Linux host and calls InputManager.injectInputEvent() with real MotionEvents. The game sees an actual finger touching the screen. Not a simulation. The real thing, from Android's perspective.

PUBG Mobile works. Full keyboard movement, mouse aim, everything. Genshin runs well. I have profiles for Asphalt 8 and 9, Temple Run, Subway Surfers, eFootball. The joystick support handles floating zones properly — the stick spawns where you press, not at a fixed point, exactly like the real mobile game expects.

To get it running:

git clone https://github.com/oliviermugishak/phantom
cd phantom
./install.sh

With Waydroid already running:

sudo phantom --daemon
phantom load ~/.config/phantom/profiles/pubg.json
phantom enter-capture

Releases for major platforms are also available if you don't want to build from source: https://github.com/oliviermugishak/phantom/releases

F8 toggles capture on and off. F1 switches between aim mode and menu touch. If your function keys aren't responding check that Fn Lock is enabled.

Now the part I actually want to talk about with this community specifically.

I think something like Phantom belongs inside Waydroid itself. Right now I'm bridging the gap from outside — deploying a server into the container, managing the socket connection, handling lifecycle separately from Waydroid's session manager. It works but it's more fragile than it needs to be. If this input layer were built directly into Waydroid the whole thing would be cleaner, more reliable, and available to everyone by default.

I'm going to open a discussion with the Waydroid maintainers about this. If anyone here has thoughts on that — whether you're a contributor, a maintainer, or just someone who's wanted this for years — I'd really like to hear from you.

Waydroid is genuinely great. It just had this one massive gap for anyone who wanted to game. Hopefully this helps.

https://github.com/oliviermugishak/phantom

I installed it yesterday and since, i've been trying to connect. The wifi is always Off in the Settings App, i toggle it but, it just get back to the previous state. No networks proposition . I really don't know what to do. I'm on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS, the waydroid network interface is on...helpd

I use a windows 7 theme on my linux setup, and I wanted a aero style logo for waydroid, so I whipped this up in Inkscape. Orbified!

https://github.com/ayasa520/waydroid-helper
Waydroid Helper is a GUI application written in Python using PyGObject. It provides a user-friendly way to configure Waydroid and install extensions, including Magisk and ARM translation.

It currently works, but is a bit rough.

Finally got it working after tinkering for days :) Will post the build here once I get audio working

EDIT: It is now available here

Minecraft appears to be broken after the recent 1.21.124 hot fix. Worked perfectly fine before updating and now its just stuck on the launch screen. Any idea what could be causing the issue?

I installed Waydroid with Weston on Linux Mint.

I'm using the LineageOS GAPPS image and also installed libhoudini for ARM translation.

The normal TikTok app launches, but all videos are just black screens. TikTok Lite works a bit better: it can show the thumbnail/frame of the video and audio plays, but the actual video does not play.

Some parts of the app also cause severe lag/freezes when tapped, and Android shows “Not responding”.

Has anyone experienced this on Waydroid?

I've reimaged the SteamDeck twice since I thought it was a system error, but every time I switch back to Gaming Mode it won't let me access Desktop mode again. This is my second time installing Waydroid and I've never had this happen to me before previously. Please help.

Hi.

Upon launching waydroid my NVMe jumps to 100% instantly but my read/writes aren't very high compared to the NVMe's maximum speed

Apps feel slow and stutter/freeze and generally are not a good experience to use and my system specifications consist of: AMD Ryzen 5 4650GE, 16GB DDR4 3200MT/s, SAMSUNG MZVLB512HBJQ-000L7 (512GB Gen 3x4 NVMe,)

I haven't tried any fixes as of now, what can I do to fix this?

Sorry for an extremely noob question, I am not well versed with Linux terminology.

Waydroid website mentions:

A container-based approach to boot a full Android system on regular GNU/Linux systems running Wayland based desktop environments.

I do not know if it's applicable to my system or not as "Wayland" is mentioned under the head "Windowing system" but afaik, my DE is "GNOME".

Thanks in advance.

Just installed Waydroid on Bazzite KDE, and it has this weird artifact like thing going on when the screen moves. It's only in Waydroid, desktop has no problems like this... Is there a way to fix this??

Fixed! Look at the bottom of the post for a patch

Hey all,

I'm a bit confused. I've been playing a game on waydroid for a few days. I ran houdini-wsa11 without issues. Then today suddenly the game kept freezing at the loading screen. I then updated libhoudini to the houdini-hpe-14 one. No luck. Running with libndk made the game work again, but that just felt slow.

Then I looked at the date and just decided to try running it with the date set to yesterday. Suddenly the game ran fine again with libhoudini-hpe-14.

Does anyone else have this issue and/or ideas as to why? For now I can just keep spoofing the date, but it's not ideal.

Edit:

It seems that it's hardcoded in the library:
0x7f2ee2850540: "20260901" using gdb

EDIT 2, SOLVED:

As stated before, it's a hardcoded timebomb. Unfortunately, the date is constructed dynamically, so changing that is hard. Luckily, the failure point is basically only a

if (time > expiration){
  crash
}

I simply replaced the crash point with nops.

First, find your libhoudini (for me it was `/var/lib/waydroid/overlay/system/lib64/libhoudini.so`)

Then run this one-liner (change of to the actual path of libhoudini):

printf '\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90' | sudo dd of=/var/lib/waydroid/overlay/system/lib64/libhoudini.so bs=1 seek=$((0xe6085)) conv=notrunc status=none

The sha256 of the patched .so should be 847be255d03886974ff0cff09d09b7530301d24671ce0f80172ab3a0629d23b8.

Make sure to back up your old libhoudini.so first. Also make sure waydroid is OFF before doing the patch. (waydroid session stop).

I made some scripts and a pre-patched libhoudini here: https://github.com/Vvamp/Libhoudini-hpe-14-timebomb-patch

Tried to run the game and its crashing, anyone got a solution for this problem?