Canonical shipped Anbox Cloud 1.30.0 on 17 June 2026, and the headline feature is support for virtualized Android. Until now Anbox Cloud ran Android inside containers. With this release you can boot a complete Android system image inside a lightweight virtual machine, with its own kernel and its own system services.
Two ways to run Android
From 1.30.0 onward you get two execution models, and both are orchestrated the same way through the APIs you already use:
- Android container inside a container. The classic model. Android stays constrained to the container environment, which makes it efficient when you want to scale many application-focused instances.
- Android virtual machine inside a container. The new model. Here Android runs as a complete VM, with its own kernel and system environment, free of the limits a container imposes.
In both cases LXD handles isolation, resource management, and orchestration. So you switch execution models without changing how you work with the platform.
What the VM unlocks that was harder before
The practical difference is system fidelity. With virtualized Android you can launch images that carry custom kernels, modified system services, and vendor-specific components. That opens up cases the container couldn’t cover well:
- Custom AOSP or AAOS (Android Automotive) builds.
- OEM-specific images.
- Modified Google reference images, such as Cuttlefish.
- System validation and device-level testing.
- Platform development and workloads that touch low-level Android behavior.
If you do system-level development or test virtual hardware, this is the missing piece. If instead you build app-focused services that need to scale hard, the containerized model is still the more efficient option. One doesn’t replace the other: they coexist, and you pick based on the workload.
Canonical’s take
Cedric Gegout, Canonical’s VP of Products, puts it this way: with virtualized Android in Anbox Cloud, developers can now run complete Android system images on cloud and bare-metal infrastructure such as Google Cloud C4A-metal. That bare-metal angle matters if you want full control of the stack without intermediate layers.
Why it matters to you
Android is, worth remembering, the most widely used Linux-based system in the world, and much of its development runs through emulating and virtualizing devices on servers. Having a VM with its own kernel inside the same orchestration platform removes friction when you need to reproduce a vendor image or debug something the container wouldn’t expose. And since Anbox Cloud builds on Ubuntu and LXD, it fits a server you already run.
The update is available as of the announcement date. If you manage Android fleets in the cloud, it’s worth checking whether your workloads fit better as a VM or a container.
Source
Virtualized Android comes to Anbox Cloud — official Canonical announcement on the ubuntu.com blog.