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Trying Out the New Android Linux Terminal

I heard about this news of Google preparing to let you run Linux apps on Android back in October, 2024. And then, a few days ago, I learned that it's actually live on Android 15... so I had to try it out.

To enable this, I had to go into the Developer options in Settings and then enable the Linux development environment option. It downloads some ~500 MB of data before the terminal actually starts.

Screenshots from Android Native Linux Terminal

Yes, I installed neofetch and htop and you can see how it looks above. Cool, right?

And then I suddenly got an idea to install Node.js and run a basic Next.js app, and it just took me ~5 mins to install everything and the app was running. I even recorded the screen with a bit of commentary that you can watch here.

At the very first, I installed the nodejs and npm by running below commands one by one (as you will see in the video above):

sudo apt install nodejs

sudo apt install npm

I, then, directly ran the below command to set up a new Next.js application, and it worked. As it was just a test, I just chose all the default options and everything was ready.

npx create-next-app@latest

Lastly, I ran the npm run dev command inside the project folder and the app was running. I clicked on the Network link (http://192.168.0.2:3000) and the app opened (you'll my excitement in the video).

It's just the start, and I'm sure the Linux thing will become even more powerful in the near future. I am really really excited for it.