this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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Do you currently daily Ubuntu touch? How is it?
It's good, no annoying UI gotchas, never had a problem with calling/receiving/texts. Waydroid works great using F-Droid/Aurora store.
I am very uneducated on the topic so bear with me here, can you run android apps on Linux mobile? Thinking banking apps here- thats the main thing holding me back. Not that I really NEED to do mobile banking mobile most days but it has saved my hide a couple times lol. Been thinking about changing the os on my Motorola, my buddy told me to try graphene but it's pixel only. Not sure where to start but would love to de Google my phone a bit, tired of having to go and disable "features" (Gemini, assistant etc). Android these days is so bloated and sheisty it makes windows look good FFS. If the next update adds one more bs "feature" that might be the last push I need lmfao.
What the other person said is true, I have a second old phone that I installed Ubuntu on. It's really limited which phone support it though good chance you don't have one.
Banking apps are going to check what is called "play integrity API" which checks if the device is secure locked, and not rooted. The app which allows you to use Android apps on Ubuntu touch is called Waydroid. It basically runs a full Android phone in a virtual machine. I very, very much doubt banking apps will like it. A lot of them will not run on a rooted Android phone for this reason.
Other apps will work fine. A little slow, plus it's a real battery hog to emulate the whole Android system. So if I was really trying to daily drive Ubuntu touch, I would only open the Android app for as long as I needed it and immediately shut the system down. I would try to find native apps as much as possible.
Ah I just looked at the supported devices and I do not have one. Did lead me down a rabbit hole looking at the pine phones and minimal phones though... Hopefully next time I'm in the market for a phone there's better options! I was not considering moving away from Android when I got my moto yet.
I have Ubuntu touch installed on my pixel 3a xl. On the phone i can install waydroid with gapps which will allow you to install googleplay store. You should be able to run those apps, i don't use googleplay store though so your experiences may vary, just installed it to see if i could.. All i can say is give it a go. There are some other phones on the market you could buy and try it out.
On Ubuntu Touch i installed waydroid through the openstore then in terminal i had to use this command to run waydroid with gapps. sudo waydroid init -f -s GAPPS good resource on waydroid https://docs.waydro.id/
Thanks a ton! Saved this comment as I do have a couple old phones kicking around I could try to experiment on that aren't terribly outdated. If I can get a bank app to work on one I'll run it as my daily ! Ive been hesitant about Ubuntu touch because it seemed adoptions low and I worried about lack of features, but I would like to get out of dooms rolling as much so something's probably just as well without ..