the one thing linux really hasnt been made on par with winblows yet is the dreadful amount of options for android simulation -the most popular choice seems to be Waydroid, but its such an unneeded hassle to set up at all -genymotion is just slow -and than you have things like android x86 which entirely defeat the point of an emulator
I totally get what OP is asking and am constantly annoyed by the same thing.
There’s a ton of software that can ONLY be run on a mobile OS, and rather than deal with the nightmare that is a physical Android phone with all of its limitations and restrictions, it would be nice to have these things running in a VM that I can fully control. There’s software that demands access to insane and ridiculous permissions, and I’m not going to install those to my physical Android phone and deal with the privacy problems. But a completely isolated VM with burner accounts that I can run in a window on the desktop I’m already using most of the time anyway? I’ll take that. Also, I don’t see the need to shell out the ridiculous price premiums for phone models with the most storage space when I only use a handful of apps when I’m mobile anyway. An app I might need two or three times a year still takes up that space on my phone when it could easily live on a VM and be used only when I need it at home.
Also, when Android releases new version updates and my phone manufacturer doesn’t keep up? Why should I have to go out and buy a new phone just to appease the handful of apps that decide THEY want to be cutting edge and THEY’RE going to be the ones to force me to waste money? I should be able to just spin up another VM with the new Android version and use those sporadic apps on there until I decide to upgrade my phone in my own good time.
Also, Android X86 is fine, but the most problematic apps that mess with users and force apps to newer Android versions for no other reason than being “cutting-edge” aren’t made by the kinds of companies with the forethought or customer focus to provide x86 compatible apks.
Basically, I don’t see why it’s so hard to run a full virtual, sandboxed ARM emulated vanilla Android environment, or why people aren’t clamoring for this. It’s the most practical, straightforward solution to the fragmentation/bad vendor update model that physical hardware forces on us and I assume most of us hate.
Apps “forcing” you to update are the result of developers doing their jobs. Just because you decided to buy a cheap phone or a free Android distro that doesn’t come with any update guarantees doesn’t mean they have to pour in money to keep things working for you.
I don’t know how much money you’ve paid for those old apps of yours, but unless they’re a subscription developers won’t be able to keep outdated platforms like Android 6 going forever. Vote with your wallet, buy subscriptions from apps that do support your platform of choice. Google’s compatibility library works well in many circumstances, but the backwards compatibility hacks have to make financial sense for any company-backed apps.
It’s not hard to run Android apps on computers. Windows 11 runs Android apps without external tools. Linux can run them through Waydroid or Anbox. I don’t know if there’s a Mac version, you could Apple to build in an Android runtime like Microsoft did but it’s better to find a community that’s willing to build it for macOS instead. You get bonus performance for the ARM code running on an ARM CPU!
As for Arm on x64: years ago, before x64 Android and HAXM were a thing, I used to develop against ARM virtual machines. The performance hit is absolutely atrocious. What Apple did with Rosetta2 is amazing and you can’t get that type of performance without dedicated hardware.
I don’t know if the Windows runtime supports ARM emulation, but I’m pretty sure you can drop qemu-static into the Waydroid file system and run ARM apps on your platform of choice. Expect laggy animations and 100% CPU usage at all times.