Android 16 may get a built-in Linux terminal

The March "feature drop" for Android 15 on Google Pixel devices includes an optional Linux session.

Although Google's description of the March 2025 Pixel Drop doesn't even mention it, Android Authority noticed. The feature has been in development for a while, as the site reported in October.

The new feature is an optional extra that users will need to turn on by enabling Developer Mode, which indicates its expected audience. It's not a terminal emulator that lets you access Android's underlying native Linux environment. Instead, this is a special Debian VM, running on top of the built-in Android Virtualization Framework. To the Reg FOSS desk, this sounds very similar to the built-in Linux Terminal that's available in ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex.

Like the ChromeOS Linux session, the Android one reportedly contains the Arm edition of Debian. For now this early version has little integration with the host OS, but if it catches up with its ChromeOS sibling, that will come. Android Authority got Doom running in a preview version of the environment, but reported that GUI apps wouldn't launch.

On ChromeOS, we have found this to be a very handy feature. While official ChromeBooks can install and run some Android apps, ChromeOS Flex can't. Being a bloody-minded sort of vulture, we initially used the Linux VM to run Firefox on our test ChromeOS Flex machine. It worked fine. In the early days of ChromeOS Flex back in 2022, it had problems displaying the Firefox title bar, but those glitches went away after a few releases. These days we use it to run the Debian edition of VLC for local music and video playback. It integrates well: it opens automatically when we click on a .MP4 file in the ChromeOS file manager, for instance.

Convertible Chromebooks have been around for many years now: the screen can folds back on itself, turning the machine into a chunky but usable tablet. ChromeOS is usable on a touchscreen, if a little clunky - but then, Android tablets still feel a little clunky to us - even de-Googled ones - compared to the iPad.

They are different OSes for different roles, but with two separate Linux-based consumer OSes, one for cheapo lappies and the other for fondleslabs, one can see why Google might want to find some way to combine them. That would presumably result in the other being killed off, something the company has a long history of doing. The Google graveyard currently has 296 markers.

We reported on Android 15's experimental desktop mode in mid-2024, comparing it to third-party efforts such as Samsung DeX. It looks increasingly likely that, as the site has previously speculated, rather than ChromeOS being extended with Android features, Android will be extended with ChromeOS features and may end up replacing its cheapo-laptop cousin.

In the meantime, if having a Linux terminal on your Android fondleslab feels sounds like something you'd really want, there is the existing Termux app, which already offers more functionality. It's open source and available on the Play Store, although the documentation does note several restrictions and it may not work on everything or offer full functionality on all versions of Android on all devices. ®