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The app ran super smooth as if it was running natively
That's because it is native! Waydroid runs an android container on top of your existing kernel. You will notice that you can even see the Android processes while running Waydroid in a top utility.
Although the Android kernel is slightly customized isn't it? I thought it exposed a few extra syscalls. How do these work on Waydroid?
Used it but couldn't play any media on it, which was going to be my use case. Nvidia!!!!!. But the devs and the community are quite patient and helpful in their telegram channel.
I think a part of your positive experience is also thanks to Linux. Android emulation works better on it because the difference between Linux and Android is not that big and definitely not as big as between Windows and Android. Though Waydroid rocks anyways
It took a long long time until Android emulators on Linux worked even close to what has been available on Windows.
But now the windows one is getting scrapped whereas Waydroid is presumably sticking around.
The documentation says:
Waydroid uses Linux namespaces (user, pid, uts, net, mount, ipc) to run a full Android system in a container and provide Android applications on any GNU/Linux-based platform.
To my understanding this isn't even emulation but regular container technology.
Wouldn't some Android Apps require specific builds for x86 architectures? Does Android take care of that?
most android apps are architecure agnostic "java, kotlin etc" and even apps that are often ship "Universal binaries" which include x86, or split builds for arm and x86
I tried Waydroid and it worked very well. The app ran supersmooth as if it was running natively.
thats because it was running natively
I had a similar positive experience with Gamescope, which tamed a game that freaked out every time I moved the moude onto the other monitor.
Maybe Wayland's healthy place is as a secondary window system you launch inside your normal X11 session.