Can you use a virtual machine on Android?

If you've ever wondered if Can a virtual machine be used on Android?The answer is a pretty clear yes… but with some caveats. These days, it's not only possible to run another Android system inside your phone, but some have even managed to run it. Windows 11 ARM and Linux distributions on a phone like the Pixel 6. However, not all solutions are the same or serve the same purpose.

In this article we'll look in detail at what options you have for virtualize systems in AndroidHow well do they perform, what limitations do they have, and in what cases are they worth using? You'll see "Android within Android" alternatives like VMOS or Virtual Master, more testing and development-oriented approaches like the traditional Android Emulator, and also more geeky examples like setting up a lightweight Linux distro with apps like Limbo or even Windows 11 on a modern mobile phone.

What exactly is a virtual machine in Android?

When we talk about virtual machines on mobile, we mean running another operating system or isolated environment within Android, in a similar way to how you would do it with VirtualBox or VMware on a PC. In the context of Android, this translates mainly into two main scenarios:

• Android on Android: a second Android installation that runs as an app, isolated from the original system (as offered by VMOS or Virtual Master).
• Other systems within AndroidLinux or Windows ARM running in a virtualization or emulation layer (as with QEMU or Limbo).

This isolation allows the apps or systems running inside that “box” Do not touch or modify the main Android system.This is very useful for development and testing, as well as for privacy, security, or simply for having two different spaces on the same mobile device.

VMOS: a virtual Android that lives as an app

VMOS is one of the names that comes up most often when talking about virtual machines in AndroidBasically, it's a "virtual phone" that you install like any other app from Google Play (or their website), but which actually downloads and runs a complete and independent Android system inside your device.

This virtual Android behaves as if it were another separate mobileIt has its own desktop, apps, settings, and storage. The applications you install within VMOS shouldn't affect the real system; even if an app is malicious or contains a virus, in theory it remains confined to the virtual machine. It cannot "escape" the main AndroidThis makes VMOS a kind of advanced sandbox, ideal for testing and protecting your phone.

Key functions of VMOS

Among the most interesting features of VMOS are several functions designed for both advanced users and those who simply want to... a safer or separate environment:

• Protection and isolationIt runs an independent Android system, ideal for development testing, testing suspicious APKs, or experimenting without fear of damaging the original system.
• Multiple machines at the same time: allows you to have multiple instances of virtual Android running in the background, so you can use different spaces depending on what you need (work, games, tests, etc.).
• Easy multitaskingIt includes a "floating button" for quickly switching between the real system and the virtual machine, making moving between the two environments quite convenient.
• Adjustable settingsYou can modify VM parameters (such as allocated resources or system settings) to adapt it to different uses and devices.
• File Transfer: offers options of transfer apps and files from the physical phone to the VM and vice versa, something key if you want to move data or install apps easily.

An interesting extra is that this architecture can also be used for encrypt files or photos keeping them within the virtual environment, away from the direct view of other apps you have installed on the main system.

What's the point of having Android within Android?

It might sound strange to have "an Android running inside another Android," but in practice it opens up a lot of possibilities. With VMOS you can create a completely separate space that might be useful, for example, for:

• Use two accounts of apps that normally do not allow multiple sessions, such as WhatsApp, Facebook or certain games.
• Set up a “parallel” environment where save photos, contacts and data without mixing them with those from the main mobile phone.
• Test with permissions root inside the VM without rooting the actual phone, something ideal for developers or curious users.
• Leave apps or games running in the background on the virtual system while you continue using the main Android device for other tasks.
• Test how apps behave in older versions of Android like Lollipop, since the ROMs that VMOS downloads are usually lightweight and without many pre-installed apps.

The virtual system initially starts with Android Lollipop 5.1 It's quite clean, taking up less than 300 MB of downloaded ROM. The first boot may take between five and ten minutes, depending on the phone's processing power, but once the system image is created, The following openings are much faster.

Root inside the virtual machine

One of VMOS's great strengths is that it allows you to to have root access on the virtual Android With a simple adjustment, without touching the original system at all. The virtual machine doesn't come rooted by default, but you can enable it from the Developer Options of the internal Android system.

Within those options appears a switch called “ROOT”After activating it, you'll need to restart the virtual machine (that is, "shut it down" and restart it from the app). When it boots up again, you'll see that the typical app has been installed. superuser permissions managementFrom there you can control which apps within the VM get root access.

It is important to emphasize that This root only affects the virtual systemThe phone's Android system remains intact and unrooted, so if something breaks or an app gets out of hand, the damage stays confined to the virtual machine.

Permissions and performance in VMOS

To make the experience as realistic as possible, VMOS requests a number of sensitive permissions: access to the IMEI, storage, location, and other dataAccording to the developers, these are used to allow the virtual Android to behave like a real device, but it's important to be aware that, in practice, You trust the app quite a bit by granting him these accesses.

In terms of performance, you have to assume that your phone is running two systems simultaneously: the real Android system and the emulated one. This means that performance suffersEspecially on lower-to-mid-range devices. Even so, with a decent phone, it runs smoothly enough for everyday tasks and many apps, and you can also use it in full-screen mode or in other modes. picture-in-picture via the floating button, which adds considerable convenience.

Virtual Master: another “virtual phone” on your Android

Virtual Master is another application based on technology from Android virtualization on AndroidTheir proposal is very similar to VMOS's: it creates an isolated "second phone" within your device, with its own system based (in this case) on Android 7.1.2.

The virtual system that Virtual Master creates functions as a parallel space Or even as a local "cloud phone," except everything runs on the phone itself. You can install its apps, organize its home screen, change wallpapers, and customize it to your liking as if it were a standalone phone.

Main uses of Virtual Master

Virtual Master is designed primarily for those who need to manage multiple accounts or separate environments within the same device. Among its most notable use cases:

• Multiple gaming or social media accounts running simultaneously. The apps are "cloned" within the virtual system, and you can log in with accounts different from the one on your main Android device.
• Apps and games running in parallelIt supports background execution, so you can be playing games in the VM while watching a video or browsing on the real system.
• Vulkan support in the virtual system, which improves the performance of many demanding games within Virtual Master.
• Enhanced PrivacyThe apps running on the virtual system do not have direct access to contacts, SMS, device ID, or other data from the physical mobile device, turning the VM into a kind of “Sandbox” to protect your information.

If you use online games or social media apps and want to separate your personal and professional life, or simply have trial accounts, this type of virtualized Android It's a very convenient solution.

Virtual Master Requirements and Behavior

Virtual Master needs to download an Android 7.1.2 system image of approximately 300 MBand to function smoothly it requires around 1,6 GB internal spaceObviously, the more you install inside the VM, the more space it will end up taking up.

The initial startup may take between one and two minutes, because at that moment it is Installing and configuring the image on the device. From there, boot times are reduced to a range of between 4 and 10 seconds, depending on the processor's power and the system's workload.

There are some important limitations: for now It can only be installed on the main user or administrator account. of the device, not in secondary Android profiles. If at any point the VM fails to start, it is recommended to check that there is enough space, close the app, restart the mobile device, and if it still fails, use the option of “Repair VM” in the Virtual Master settings or even uninstall and reinstall the app to regenerate the image.

Virtual spaces and app sandboxes in Android

Beyond these "heavyweight" virtual machine solutions, in Android there is the idea of virtual spaces or sandboxes to run applications in isolation. These are places where you install APKs and test them without them directly interacting with the rest of the system, similar to a lightweight virtual machine.

A native system option is to create another user or profile within Android. That already gives you a certain degree of isolation (separate apps and data), but it also has significant limitations: it's not as flexible as a VM, there are restrictions on notifications, shared resources, system permissions, and some advanced features. That's why many people turn to "parallel space" type apps or virtual systems like VMOS/Virtual Master, which They offer more control and granular isolation.

Android Emulator and AVD: Virtual Machines for Development

When talking about Android virtual machines, one cannot ignore the Official Android EmulatorHowever, in this case it doesn't run on a phone, but on a PC. The Android Emulator runs the Android operating system in a virtual machine called Android Virtual Device (AVD)which includes the entire Android software stack and behaves like a physical device; it also serves to Install APKs on Windows using the virtual machine and the SDK.

Architecture and image creation AVD

The Android Emulator architecture is based on a virtual machine that boots a Android system imageGoogle provides a number of ready-to-use images (x86, x86_64, ARM, various Android versions, etc.), but you can also compile your own custom images from the AOSP source code.

The typical flow for create a custom AVD image goes through:

1. Download the Android source code to a directory (for example, aosp-main) with the tools of repo, execute repo init y repo sync to bring all the necessary branches.
2. Configure the build environment with source ./build/envsetup.sh, choosing a target such as lunch sdk_phone_x86_64 and run make -j32 (or the number of threads your machine supports) to generate the image.
3. Start the emulator with the command emulator, passing the appropriate command line options if you need to configure hardware, networks, etc.

To share these images with other Android Studio users, packages can be generated. sdk and sdk_repo or, in recent versions (Android 13 and later), use the task make emu_img_zip, which produces a ZIP file of the type sdk-repo-linux-system-images-eng..zipThat zip file is hosted on a server, referenced from a repository XML file (in Android 12 and earlier), and added as custom update site in the Android Studio SDK Manager.

Multi-screen support in the emulator

Android 10 improved multi-screen mode to cover new use cases, such as desktop mode or automatic settingsThe Android Emulator has followed this path, allowing the emulation of multi-screen environments without the need for real hardware.

To add multi-screen support to a custom AVD, you need to access the product settings and add a multi-screen provider to the file. build/target/product/sdk_phone_x86.mk and include libraries such as libemulator_multidisplay_jni.so (in 32 and 64 bits) and the package MultiDisplayProvider.apkAdditionally, the corresponding function marker is enabled in device/generic/goldfish/data/etc/advancedFeatures.ini with a line like MultiDisplay = on.

All of this makes the emulator a very powerful tool for Test apps on foldable devices, multiple monitors, or advanced scenarios which would be difficult to reproduce using only a physical phone.

Advanced virtual machines on Android 13: Windows 11 and Linux on a Pixel 6

Android 13 has brought significant improvements to the virtualization subsystem, and some striking examples have already emerged, such as that of a developer (Danny Lin, alias @kdragon) that managed to execute Windows 11 ARM as a virtual machine on a Google Pixel 6 with a preview version of Android 13 (Developer Preview 1).

The case is amusing if we remember that Microsoft never managed to make Windows Phone or Windows 10 Mobile a success. They didn't take hold in the market, and yet now we see Windows 11 running quite usably on an Android phone. The videos Lin showed demonstrate how Windows starts up, logs in, and runs reasonably smoothly., even though at that time there was no GPU graphics acceleration and the graphics were somewhat limited.

To set up that virtual machine, the following was used: QEMUA classic emulation and virtualization project. Even with the lack of graphics drivers, the performance was surprisingly good, to the point of being able to run games like Doom and use the interface in landscape mode with an experience not far removed from that of a laptop.

In addition to Windows 11 ARM, the same virtualization system allowed the creation and running of virtual machines with various Linux distributions for ARM architectureIn console mode, Lin described the performance as "almost identical to native," opening the door to using the mobile device as a Linux mini PC when you connect it to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

This type of use is still somewhat experimental and reserved for advanced users, but it shows where things might be headed: that your next desktop PC could actually be, your smartphone running powerful virtual machines thanks to modern hardware and virtualization support in Android.

Virtualize Linux on Android with Limbo

If what you need is something simpler, like having a small Linux terminal at hand On your mobile device, there are solutions like Limbo, which allow you to virtualize lightweight systems without having to get into complex scenarios like pure QEMU or custom builds.

A typical use of Limbo involves installing the app, downloading a lightweight Linux ISO image (for example, DSL – Damn Small Linux, which weighs about 50 MB) and create a new virtual machine from the “Load Machine > New” option. From there, you configure the ISO as the boot disk and boot the VM within your Android device.

With this approach you can execute a Reduced Linux environment for testing scripts, automations, or utilities that you only have for Linux, directly from the phone. However, the experience will depend heavily on the device's hardware and how lightweight the distribution you use is.

How well does all this work in practice?

When it comes down to it, the feasibility of using a virtual machine in Android depends on two key factorsThe device's power and your intended use will determine the performance. For Android systems running on Android (VMOS, Virtual Master), a current mid-range device will allow you to operate with relative ease, although you will notice increased resource and battery consumption.

In more extreme configurations like Windows 11 ARM or full Linux distributions with QEMU, you will need powerful processors and plenty of RAM (devices like a Pixel 6 or similar). Even so, there are limitations in graphics acceleration, drivers, and hardware compatibility that make these solutions still rather limited. projects for enthusiasts and developersnot so much products for the average user.

Compared to alternatives like creating another user in Android, virtual machines offer much deeper and more configurable isolation, allowing from clone apps with multiple accounts even testing potentially dangerous software in a closed environment. However, you have to manage permissions, storage space, and performance, and accept that all of this isn't as plug-and-play as a PC with native virtualization.

The current ecosystem demonstrates that it is indeed possible. Using virtual machines on Android with more than decent results, from small sandboxes for apps to true “PCs inside the mobile”.

What makes the difference is what you want to do: if you only need to separate accounts and data, apps like VMOS or Virtual Master are more than enough; if you're looking to compile, test, or develop in depth, the official emulator and custom AVD images on PC are still the most powerful option; and if you're into pushing the limits, the advanced virtualization of Android 13, QEMU, and Linux or Windows ARM distributions allow you to get the most out of your smartphone as if it were a pocket computer. Share this information so more users will know how to use a virtual machine on Android and its benefits..