Supposing we have an open source android app, (how) could one convert it to a linux distro package? (Like for debian, nixos, etc.)
Android is essentially a linux distro if I get it correctly, a heavily modified one.
Many android apps are written with java and the newer ones tend to go with kotlin, which I think should be able to run cross-platform.
Would hard of an attempt would this be?
Edit: Thank you people! From what I gather android is very far from the rest of linux distros (practically having in common only a few parts of the kernel) and the fact that apps tend to be written in java/kotlin doesnt have much of a difference if they are not built in a way that makes the cross-platform compatible (like godot engine does). Those apps will probably need to do many system calls to the android OS, soI can’t just compile them for a different architecture. I’d either need an android translation layer or an emulator to run them.
Unrelated, but cool to see some familiar usernames:)
Android isn’t Linux, Android is a Java implementation using a Linux kernel (IIRC) - the Linux part isn’t even “complete” - when you root you find there are tools you need to add to get typical Linux capability (busybox, init-d, etc). .
So you’re not going to install an Android APK on Linux or anything else, unless it emulates Android.
The language used doesn’t mean much - lots of stuff for Windows was written using C languages, and those would never run on Linux or Unix.
C is kind of a bad example though, as Java should mostly be platform independent. I’d think you should be able to unpack the package and run the Java code, though you’re probably missing some entry point / handles to resources, which could be provided by some kind of container, like an emulator. But then that’s not really “native”.