Canonical Announces Anbox Cloud Service to Stream Android Apps

Canonical has announced Anbox Cloud, a streaming service aimed at businesses that makes it possible to stream Android apps from servers to all kinds of other devices. The company thinks this is especially interesting for games.

Canonical describes Anbox Cloud as a mobile cloud computing platform, using Android as an engine for the virtualization of mobile tasks and apps. Anbox Cloud is designed for all kinds of scenarios where Android is run within containers, with Canonical seeing cloud gaming as a key scenario. With Anbox Cloud, parties can bring a large ecosystem of games to users, regardless of the device and operating system these end users use.

The service is specifically intended for the Android operating system and its apps. The name Anbox has been around for some time and stands for a tool that allows users to run Android apps on a Linux system, by letting Android run in a container within the Linux environment. Anbox Cloud builds on this by basically running Anbox on a server, so that the apps don’t have to run locally on the device to be used.

Canonical uses existing technologies for Anbox Cloud. The service runs Android on the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS kernel. Furthermore, LXD containers, MAAS and Juju are used. It is not yet clearer when Anbox Cloud will become available to service providers and developers and whether customers will eventually be able to use it via subscription.