termux-packages VS nix-on-droid

This fully reflects my own Android experience (https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Paul+Lutus) -- writing Android apps is by no means a write-and-forget experience. As time goes by more of my apps are dropped from the platform from my unwillingness to drop everything and rewrite code for each new Android version.

My original intent was to put my free, open-source apps on the platform, much as I had done before Android existed. But no -- Android doesn't work that way.

My best-known Android app is SSHelper (https://arachnoid.com/android/SSHelper/), a Secure Shell server meant for file transfers. Still work perfectly, dropped some time ago.

TankCalc (https://arachnoid.com/android/TankCalcAndroid/), same story. It's a well-known multi-platform app tank farm managers use to profile storage tanks. Still works, dropped from the platform.

And not just mine. Many other free, first-rate Android apps -- Termux (https://termux.dev/) comes to mind -- have been driven off the platform by Google's onerous demands and commercial focus.

It's as though a wall is going up between people who like programming and people who like money.

If you don’t have Termux installed, download it from the official source. Once installed, open Termux and update it with the following command:

No, but yes.

https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/blob/master/packag...

I just installed the package called `racket` from Termux's upstream, and it seems that they're using racket-minimal for that. But of a gotcha, but at least it doesn't seem like there's a bug.

containers/podman > [Feature]: Android support:

> There are docker and containerd in termux-packages. https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/root-p...

But Android 13+ supports rootless pKVM VMs, which podman-machine should be able to run containers in; but only APK-installed binaries are blessed with the necessary extended filesystem attributes to exec on Android 4.4+ with SELinux in enforcing mode.

- Android pKVM: https://source.android.com/docs/core/virtualization/architec... :

> qemu + pKVM + podman-machine: https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/17717 :

> The protected kernel-based virtual machine (pKVM) is built upon the Linux KVM hypervisor, which has been extended with the ability to restrict access to the payloads running in guest virtual machines marked ‘protected’ at the time of creation.

> KVM/arm64 supports different execution modes depending on the availability of certain CPU features, namely, the Virtualization Host Extensions (VHE) (ARMv8.1 and later).

- "Android 13 virtualization lets [Pixel >= 6] run Windows 11, Linux distributions" (2022)

Not from PlayStore, but apparently everyone has English reading comprehension problems and wants to write a comment anyway.

https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Termux-and-An...

If you do like the nix ecosystem (and all its benefits like reproducible envs) or just want to give it a try to a "NixOS" like thingy, you should absolutely try https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid. It's somewhat rough, but it's very nice and has nix flakes and home-manager support.

I doubt your setup needed recompiling the Nix binary itself at any point. Even I did that more out of love of adventure than for any practical reasons, it’s just that the scars are still there.

And you know what, the evaluation time thing might just be a bug. Or at least I don’t see any other reason why (e.g.) `nix-shell -p yt-dlp` in my Nix-on-Droid[1] installation works reasonably fast but `nix shell nixpkgs#yt-dlp` takes minutes.

[1] https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid

It is the Nix tool but on Android. It's kinda in the name and on the GitHub.

t184256/nix-on-droid