r/PrivacyGuides • u/Bunolio • Sep 01 '22

Waydroid or GrapheneOS Question

Should I use Waydroid on pc or GrapheneOS on mobile to use applications, games.... ?

2 Upvotes

62% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

9

u/GrapheneOS Sep 01 '22

Waydroid uses an insecure fork of Android 10 with most of the security model disabled (apps not actually sandboxed) and without proper security updates. It's generally used within an OS without an application security model or systemic privacy security work on the OS. It's not a good way to run Android apps.

If you want to run Android apps outside Android, you're far better off using the official Android emulator with AOSP 13 where the apps are sandboxed and you have an up-to-date OS with the current security model and ongoing security updates. It doesn't change that the environment that you're using it allows applications to do anything, etc. but the Android apps are contained well.

2

u/Bunolio Sep 01 '22

It's better to use GrapheneOS to get the regular update and sandboxed Google Play than Waydroid with Android 10 with no security update and no sandboxed apps, I think I understand better. If my Pixel has a sim card in it, can my provider know what apps I'm using on Wi-Fi or Ethernet? Or in another profile to only use the apps ?

Which official Android emulation are you talking about with Android 13 with sandboxed applications and security updates? I would like to know

6

u/GrapheneOS Sep 01 '22

If my Pixel has a sim card in it, can my provider know what apps I'm using on Wi-Fi or Ethernet?

No. The SIM card is an isolated secure element. Radios are also isolated.

Which official Android emulation are you talking about with Android 13 with sandboxed applications and security updates? I would like to know

Android has an official emulator intended for developers but usable by others. On Linux, it uses QEMU and also KVM when possible. You can run x86_64 emulator images of AOSP 13 on an x86_64 machine with hardware accelerated virtualization and also GPU acceleration. It can have reasonable performance and is running the real OS inside a VM. The emulator builds aren't quite production builds but they do have the security model intact other than hardware security features being missing and the OS running the VM having control over everything and generally a much weaker security model.

One way to get this is installing Android Studio which has a GUI for managing the SDK packages including the emulator. You can install the emulator and an x86_64 AOSP 13 emulator image to run in it.