Run Linux containers on Android, no root required

Podroid spins up a lightweight Alpine Linux VM on Android using QEMU, providing a full Podman container runtime and terminal without requiring root access.

Run Linux containers on Android — no root required.

Podroid spins up a lightweight Alpine Linux VM on your phone using QEMU and gives you a fully working Podman container runtime with a built-in serial terminal.

Key Features

Containers: Pull and run any OCI image — podman run --rm -it alpine sh
Terminal: Full xterm emulation with Ctrl, Alt, F1-F12, arrows, and more
Persistence: Packages, configs, and container images survive restarts
Networking: Internet access out of the box, port forwarding to Android host
Self-contained: No root, no Termux, no host binaries — just install the APK

Requirements

arm64 Android device
Android 14+ (API 34)
~150 MB free storage

Quick Start

Install the APK from Releases
Open Podroid and tap Start Podman
Wait for boot (~20 s) — progress is shown on screen and in the notification
Tap Open Terminal and run containers:

podman run --rm alpine echo hello
podman run --rm -it alpine sh
podman run -d -p 8080:80 nginx

Technical Architecture

Android App: Foreground Service keeps the VM alive. UI built with Jetpack Compose.
PodroidQemu: Uses libqemu-system-aarch64.so (QEMU TCG, no KVM). Serial stdio is wired to the TerminalEmulator.
Alpine Linux VM: Uses initramfs as a read-only base layer and an ext4 disk as a persistent overlay. Includes Podman, crun, netavark, and slirp4netns.

Networking: QEMU user-mode networking (SLIRP) puts the VM at 10.0.2.15. Port forwarding uses QEMU's hostfwd, managed at startup via CLI args and at runtime via QMP.

Terminal: The terminal is powered by Termux's TerminalView with full VT100/xterm emulation. Terminal dimensions are synced to the VM via stty so TUI apps render correctly.