NGI Mobifree Grants Awarded for Fair Mobile Software

The open calls for funding are managed by NLnet foundation Termux is an Android app that provides a terminal emulator and a GNU/Linux distribution environment with 2000+ packages and executes programs natively on Android host OS/kernel, without any emulation or containerisation. Under the NGI Mobifree grant the following three improvements to Termux are planned to be implemented: 1) A termux-core library will be created which allows external projects to use Termux execution environment in their own apps. 2) A new APK Library File (APKLF) execution/packaging design will be implemented so that Termux can comply with security restrictions in Android 10 and newer that prevents apps from executing downloaded code. 3) Package sources will be patched to read paths from environment variables exported by the app, or compiled package files will be patched at install time, rather than relying on hardcoded paths in the package files to Termux rootfs. This leaves users either unserved or with a huge dependency on a few large vendors that bundle their own location service (based on non-public data sources and dark code) - with the latter users being dependent on the availability of and connectivity to specific machines on the internet. The idea is that by translating function calls (which would normally handled by Android) to work with equivalent functionality already present on a Linux (or potentially UNIX-based) system, the user is able to run android apps on such a system like they would any other application as-is.