Waydroid - Gapps Image
Sync your Google Contacts, Calendar, and Drive across your Linux desktop and Android container without friction.
As of 2024, most Waydroid installations run Android 11 (RED). Future updates may move to Android 13. Check the official Waydroid documentation or GitHub releases to confirm the current version.
Download both the system.img and vendor.img from a trusted community source. For this example, we assume:
Place them in a directory, e.g., ~/waydroid-images/.
GAPPS stands for Google Apps (Play Store, Play Services, Gmail, Maps, etc.).
Stock Android Open Source Project (AOSP) does not include these. To use Google apps on an Android system, you need to install GAPPS.
Waydroid officially provides two types of system images:
| Image Type | Includes GAPPS? | Use Case | |------------|----------------|-----------| | Vanilla (AOSP) | No | Open‑source only, no Google dependencies | | GAPPS | Yes | Full Google services + Play Store |
The Waydroid GAPPS image is a pre‑built Android system image that already includes Google Mobile Services (GMS) and the Play Store.
Waydroid does not auto‑update the Android system image. To get a newer GAPPS image:
sudo waydroid upgrade -s GAPPS
This downloads the latest official image from ota.waydro.id.
Your user data (/var/lib/waydroid/data) is preserved.
Pick a minimal GApps variant to reduce conflicts. OpenGApps offers several variants (pico, nano, stock). Choose the variant that matches Android version and CPU arch (arm64 for most Waydroid images).
Example:
Download:
wget -O open_gapps.zip "https://opengapps.org/path/to/open_gapps-arm64-11.0-pico.zip"
unzip open_gapps.zip -d open_gapps
For advanced users, scripts like mk_waydroid_gapps.sh (available on GitHub) download an AOSP base and a Gapps package (e.g., MindTheGapps), then merge them into a flashable system.img.
Check your image’s description for arm64 vs amd64 and for mention of Houdini support.
