Run Linux containers on Android, no root required

Summary

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. 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 arm64 Android device Android 14+ (API 34) ~150 MB free storage 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 Run containers: podman run --rm alpine echo hello podman run --rm -it alpine sh podman run -d -p 8080:80 nginx The terminal is powered by Termux's TerminalView with full VT100/xterm emulation wired directly to the VM's serial console. Extra keys bar (scrollable): ESC TAB SYNC CTRL ALT arrows HOME END PGUP PGDN F1–F12 - / | CTRL / ALT are sticky toggles — tap once, then press a letter SYNC manually pushes the terminal dimensions to the VM Terminal size auto-syncs on keyboard open/close so TUI apps (vim, btop, htop) render correctly Bell character triggers haptic feedback Forward ports from the VM to your Android device: Go to Settings Add a rule (e.g. TCP 8080 -> 80) Access the service at localhost:8080 on your phone Rules persist across restarts and can be added or removed while the VM is running. Android App ├── Foreground Service (keeps VM alive) ├── PodroidQemu │ ├── libqemu-system-aarch64.so (QEMU TCG, no KVM) │ ├── Serial stdio ←→ TerminalEmulator │ └── QMP socket (port forwarding, VM control) └── Alpine Linux VM ├── initramfs (read-only base layer) ├── ext4 disk (persistent overlay) ├── getty on ttyAMA0 (job control) └── Podman + crun + netavark + slirp4netns Boot sequence: QEMU loa...