Google is looking to offer a native Terminal app for Android, possibly with Android 16. The Terminal app will allow installation of a Linux VM with full GUI and GPU acceleration along with other sysadmin features including disk resizing, port forwarding, and partition recovery. This is an extension of Google's earlier project of allowing Chrome OS to run on Android using the Android Virtualization Framework.
Cool I guess, but why? What’s the use case? Are they trying to bridge the gap between ChromeOS and Android? I know they’re inspired a lot by DeX, which is awesome, but as far as I know that mode is mostly for like desktop-like browsing. Not really for development, which is what you’d use a Linux VM terminal for.
It’s probably just something that one of the AOSP devs wanted (to scratch an itch and all of that). It might also mean they won’t have a GUI app to manage the VM initially and you’ll just use the new Terminal.
Honestly they should just enable user namespaces. That would allow apps to create containers.