Waydroid on Volla Phone Plinius.
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I have used linux since 2016, but never on a phone till now, seeing that Volla phones come with linux I kept an eye on the lineup as I didn't see anything that screamed perfect for my usecases.
Then the Plinius is released, it has everything I want from a phone, everything, and it comes with something that I love (linux), but I live in a country that is extremely dependent on some android apps such as BankID (thanks scandinavia), I have gotten BankID to work on both GrapheneOS and /e/OS so Ubuntu Touch wasn't a problem for me (I thought) because of waydroid.
As long as I can get waydroid, I can get my essential apps for day to day in this dystopian digital society.
I have never used debian/ubuntu (only fedora and arch based distros) before so I read the Ubuntu Touch pamphlet that came with my brand new Volla Plinius to figure out how to get waydroid working, it said to use waydroid helper.
I turn on my phone and immediately update everything, then I go to open store and download waydroid helper, I press install and wait, nothing is happening, it is just there infinitely, it says preparing to download image but nothing is happening.
I do some research, I find this forum, some guys says it can take up to an hour, another person reports it took him a whole two hours, I put it on and wait an hour, it doesn't work, it still says "preparing to download image", I then continue to wait two hours and still nothing, I then decide to let it run overnight and wait a full 8 hours while sleeping, nothing again.
I then check the documentation which gives me different directions than the pamphlet that my phone came with, I write "waydroid init" into my terminal, I get root error so I instead write "sudo waydroid init" and I get that it failed tp get vendor OTA ID, with a specific Halium 14 json version of waydroid.
I end up doing even more research and find out that I can manually download waydroid and do sudo waydroid init -f and it should use the manually downloaded image instead.
That's when I learn that the latest waydroid version available on sourceforge is Halium 13, I think back to when I tried to use the terminal and it said halium_14.json so I research and according to my research halium 13 is not compatible with halium 14 devices, so there is seemingly not even a point in me using the halium 13 waydroid image as it won't work according to both google and duckduckgo.
So now I am just lost, is there no solutions to my predicament?
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So far I have not heard of anyone getting BankID to work in waydroid in their phones. The security checks don't accept the OS. I use a small hardware token for my BankID codes.
I would first get a verification either here or in the Volla telegram group that waydroid has been activated for the Plinius. I don't own that device, and don't know for sure.
Then I would try again with Waydroid Helper. Leave the screen on, do not let the phone go to sleep while you wait for the download to start. The process has taken me around an hour before. Also try changing networks. My home wifi could be really slow, but sharing 5G via another phone made the process go faster. I have never tried doing this with a different image than the standard one.
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@Ida_ Does the google free version of waydroid come with MicroG cause you can make MicroG report it is running a different OS, this fixes BankID, that's what I did on /e/OS.
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Does the google free version of waydroid come with MicroG
Not automatically, but it can be installed. I'm having trouble remembering how I did this, but here's a video that may help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UNbDCZMQqE -
@Moem That's pretty cool, I am still stuck tho looking for suggestions to get waydroid on my device.
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@DerekZoZo I've tried, but not succeeded. Waydroid is still seen as a rooted system by the app, so it refuses to run. But maybe you find a way in the future. If you ever do, I would really appreciate a guide if you have the time.
I am getting some banking apps to work in Waydroid, so it is still very useful.
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@DerekZoZo I've tried, but not succeeded. Waydroid is still seen as a rooted system by the app, so it refuses to run. But maybe you find a way in the future. If you ever do, I would really appreciate a guide if you have the time.
I am getting some banking apps to work in Waydroid, so it is still very useful.
It probably is not "rooted," as such, but unlocked bootloader. That is, unless you actually rooted the Android image. it's still dumb, and I'm not sure unlocked bootloader can be "fixed" without locking the bootloader at the hardware level (which you should not do with Ubuntu Touch).
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