For years, UserLAnd (and its predecessor GNURoot) has had one job: get a real Linux distribution running on your Android phone or tablet, with no root, no unlocked bootloader, and no PC involved. The engine behind that has always been proot - a clever piece of software that fakes a Linux root filesystem on top of Android's own kernel. Clever, but faking it has limits. So we added a second engine. Starting with this release, UserLAnd can run your distro inside an actual virtual machine - a separate Linux kernel, booted on your device, using the same hardware virtualization the OS itself uses. You pick it per filesystem, right where you always chose your connection type. The dropdown now reads: Standard (proot) - the classic UserLAnd experience, on every device Virtual Machine (pro) - a genuine VM, on devices that support it What proot actually does - and why it hits a wall proot doesn't create a Linux system. It intercepts your programs' system cal...
About 1 month ago UserLAnd Technologies' apps which allow you to play retro games on Android stopped working. The reason for this is that these apps act as a sort of browser extension for what the Internet Archive has archived. The apps provide a way to meaningfully use these games on Android, but we don't host the games ourselves. This generally works well but the Internet Archive suffered multiple attacks (DDoS, databases hacked and website defaced) at the beginning of October. The end result was that all of their services went offline. The team at the Internet Archive prioritized getting the Wayback Machine and other services working before they restored their collection of games. The good news is that the games (and other sw) are now back online. Their blog has a summary of what is working currently. I am guessing we will see some slowness and some random outages as they continue to restore and improve their services, bu...