I’ve switched to Ubuntu as my personal daily driver for over two years now. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about has been running Android-based games, since Android is basically Linux under the hood. One of the games I’ve gotten into recently was Blue Archive, for which I have the anime adaptation that aired this past Spring season to thank. Naturally, it seemed like a game that would be great to run on my Framework laptop.
One emulator I found was Waydroid. As it name sort of implies, it runs on Wayland, which I have (more or less) switched over from X11. Installing it was relatively straightforward: I just followed the tutorial and installed it with GAPPS, thought I did run into some issues with the SourceForge image downloads on one day. I gave up and retried a few days later where it finally worked.
Getting Google Play to work properly was also covered in the tutorials, and I just had to enter my Google Services Framework ID in the right place. After that, I wasn’t able to install Blue Archive because my system was x86_64, while it presumably needed to run on arm64. Thankfully, there’s a nice handy script (aptly) named waydroid_scripts that covers this, namely enabling arm64 translation. I ended up using the libndk arm translation. This allowed me to install Blue Archive successfully.
The next roadblock I faced was getting Blue Archive to load past the initial screen. Basically, I could download assets, but after that, the “Now Loading” indicator never finishes and just hangs and the game crashes.
Thankfully, other Senseis also ran into similar issues, and viable workarounds were all discussed in that GitHub issue. After fixing a permissions issue and patching one arm translation using a in-place hex replacement, the game loaded!
Anyways, this is just me dumping this info for myself in case I have to revisit this at some point. I might try other mobages later, like Azur Lane (which I haven’t touched in quite a long time). I need to sleep cause I have a 7AM flight to catch.
Until next time!
~Lui
