1d ago

The new Debian VM on Android 15 - what use-cases are there?

The latest version of Android 15 on the Pixel devices lets you enable an experimental Terminal app and Debian VM. What are the fun use-cases of this, that you can think of? Let's assume the finalised version of this feature will include the ability for sound drivers and proper port mapping/forwarding.

Running web servers off your phone might become feasible
Basic light development work
Use to easily SSH to other clients if needed
Already proven it can run DOOM

There's bound to be many more use-cases as this feature expands, and especially when Android replaces ChromeOS in the future.

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14 comments

Depends, if it can do everything that termux does without some kind of security features that will make it unusable it can prolong device life and phones have a lot of different things in them including great cameras!
- Well right now it's still just a VM and whilst you have root access you can't access anything on your phone as it appears to be sandboxed. Not sure about camera access.
  But yeah, in theory you could use an old Android phone instead of buying a raspberry pi, for any little side project. Ideally Google adds a way to enable the VM at boot as right now you can't do that.
  
  A VM running a fully-fledged operating system should never, ever have root access to its host device...
  
  Well, yeah. Obviously.
  
  Well if ika1988 says so.
  That was not about root access, but full access to hardware features.
  
  Well right now it’s still just a VM and whilst you have root access you can’t access anything on your phone as it appears to be sandboxed.
  This is what they said. I misunderstood and I'll own that, but I read this as them wanting host filesystem access. Which is an obvious no-no for VMs.
  
  The problem with phones is just the battery. The battery is probably not getting bypassed when charging, so when you just leave it running for a long time without looking at it, that might be a safety issue. But I'm also just guessing, I don't know if it's really that dangerous.
  
  It's still not ideal but you can at least set a charge limit and set it really low like 50% which is about where those batteries degrade the least.
  But yeah using a lithium ion battery as a capacitor ain't great. BMS is just gonna charge it some, let it drain, charge it some, let it drain, repeat over and over again. There's a reason store phones tend to become spicy pillows so much after a while of being on display always on always running some animation.
  This is already what happens when you leave it plugged in to charge overnight, except it uses very little power so the battery only gets topped off a handful of times.
  The heat caused by the busy CPU would also be a rather big problem for the battery.

14 comments