Android App-Support Update?

The version of Android support, according to the website at SailfishX, is at version 10, which came out in 2019, so after 3 years, it will probably expire this year at the latest.
Are there currently plans to update to a newer version 11-13?

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Android 10 has in fact entered EOL in september 2022…

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What’s important is EOS.

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Whatever as long as Jolla can ship an update #shipit :slight_smile:

Yes, and that seems to be 2023-09-03: Android OS | endoflife.date

Hence Jolla still has a couple of months time to update Alien Dalvik (“Android app support”) to AOSP 11.

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As far as I tried to see, after Android 11 no ubports/halium/hybris references were made to android 12. Not even an Xperia 10 IV branch in sight.
(I’m talking about an entire community of people wanting glibc/linux on their android hardware, not just Jolla).

All of which I hope is just work needed to be done…

The grim scenario would be that there was an android 12 change that broke the universe we were accustomed to: adapting the android middleware / vendor to our glibc linux needs.
It is hard to scan through a user-facing written changelog and spot the dragons https://source.android.com/docs/setup/about/android-12-release, one needs to try building, booting etc.

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Halium/hybris is off topic for this thread about AAS. They are not that closely related.

Then it will probably be high time to start looking for a better vessel (than the aosp one)
also hybris at least supports only 32 bit afaik?

AFAIR Google requires vendors for Android ≥ 12 to build the Android sources (AOSP or what they get from Google) on a stock kernel release, only additional device drivers are allowed; at least that was the plan as I understood it 2 or 3 years ago. I expect(ed) this to significantly simplify the adaption layer (lib)hybris for glibc based Linux distributions. Still stubs have to be provided for bionic (Android’s C-library; simple, because it provides mostly a subset of glibc, but with a few extensions taken from the *BSD’s libc), and many other Android’s special libraries (for Bluetooth etc.; some are complicated to implement, some can be omitted: hence no Bluetooth inside Alien Dalvik as of 2023). So there continues to be a lot of maintenance, adaption and potential development work for mapping these special Android user space library functions to the regular ones (e.g., bluez for Bluetooth), but utilising an “Android kernel” (which once was a heavily patched Linux kernel) should become easier.

I hope I have not missed anything, technically or a change of Google’s plans.

P.S.: No, Google is not doing this out of altruism, Open Source enthusiasm or because they would try to authentically “be not evil”, again: The burden (and hence costs) for maintaining a large set of out-of-tree kernel-patches was simply too high.

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It’s insane they wouldn’t have followed the mainline approach from the start; too slow for them perhaps?

I see, presumably you can virtualize A12 on the A10/11 host, is this what you’re saying. It might even be true for some xperia 10 today.

Yes, the device generations that have AAS 10 are running SFOS based on Android 8, 9, 10 and 11 respectively.

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This is not really / fully “virtualisation”, rather “containerisation” or classically (this is the correct term) “para-virtualisation”, because host and guest run on the same kernel. Hence the Android guest must support the kernel version the SailfishOS host runs on, which is (on most Android devices) an Android vendor kernel.

I concur with @attah (though he phrased it a bit awkwardly) that we should clearly differentiate between this “Android base” SailfishOS runs on (besides the kernel, there is also bootloader etc.), which is not the primary topic of this thread, and the para-virtualised Android, which provides an Android runtime environment on top of SailfishOS (which Jolla markets as “Android App Support” and technically is still called Alien Dalvik, although it is and always has been much more than just the Dalvik JVM), in order not avoid confusion among less technically savvy readers.

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Hi, Sailfish OS 4.5.0 that was just released includes also update for AppSupport to Android 11 API level [Release notes] Struven ketju 4.5.0.16

As a sidenote, AppSupport does not need to be running always the latest and greatest version just because it is newer, we need new enough version that is still supported by majority of Android App developers. Surely using a version that is within AOSP maintence for security patching is something we target to have for AppSupport.

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Thanks. And as as @attah said, Android 11 is also running on Xperia 10 which has an older base. Thanks!

Even on XA2 for that matter.

I hope it will be updated to 12 as that would allow automatic app updates without root/Shizuku, neither of which I have gotten working.

I hope the Android system webview will be updated because that would make my banking app work again.