Use Android apps in QubesOS
Here are three suggestions on how to use Android apps in QubesOS. I thought I’d share it here so that maybe some of you can save yourselves the trouble of having to look it all up yourselves. I’m happy to receive feedback and suggestions for improvement 
Waydroid in Ubuntu
Firstly, we click on a standalone VM and install the latest LTS version of Ubuntu in it. After updating this, we install the Waydroid software in the terminal as follows:
sudo apt update
sudp apt full-upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y curl
curl -s https://repo.waydro.id | sudo bash
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y waydroid
After installation, we start the Waydroid app and select the variant Vanilla as Android Type in the Initialise Waydroid window to install a Google-free system. (If you need GoogleServices later, simply select GAPPS here).
As soon as the installation is complete, we click on Done and start a moderately up-to-date Android with the Waydroid app. In March 2025, not a current Android 15, but at least an Android 11 with security updates from February 2024.
What I particularly like about this solution is that it also works well on relatively weak hardware. The VM in my test had no problems with just a few processor cores and 4 GB of RAM.
In a test in March 2025, the messengers Briar, Conversations, Session, Signal and Threema Libre installed in my Waydroid test qube via F-Droid worked. SimpleX, on the other hand, could not be installed. My attempt to install WhatsApp via Aurora failed because the Aurora store kept crashing. However, if I installed WhatsApp directly via an existing apk, WhatsApp also worked.
BlissOS
BlissOS undoubtedly has advantages, but is much less convenient than the Waydroid version above:
We first download the with FOSS apps version of the latest BlissOS version from here Bliss OS For PC. Then we create a new standalone VM (HVM, no memory balancing, 50GB HDD) and boot it from the ISO.
We then select Installation - Install BlissOS to harddisk. Now we create two primary partitions via Create/Modify partition, dos, the first with 30 GB, the second with 20 GB and write the changes via Write. After the installer restarts, we select the larger first partition and choose ext4 as the format. OTA updates and the Grub bootloader are of course enabled.
If the Qube freezes - simply kill it and restart. In the boot menu, we then always select VM Options, BlissOS - Vbox/VMWare No HW Acceleration. We go to the entry with the mouse and click e, now we add the parameter ‘VIRT_WIFI=1’ in the GRUB bootloader in the first line at the very end. After editing, we close the window with Ctrl + x. Now we can connect to the VirtWifi in the BlissOS VM and set the IP configuration assigned by QubesOS using the pencil at the top right (network mask is 32 here).
The nice thing about BlissOS is that the NeoStore and Aurora are already pre-installed. So you can get started straight away and install the apps you need. WhatsApp was easy to install and use via Aurora. The messengers Briar, SimpleX, Conversations and Signal could be installed and used without any problems via the NeoStore. Threema Libre and Session, on the other hand, could not be used in my test, as they started but were displayed rotated by 90°.
In my test in March 2025, BlissOS 16 was an Android 13 with security updates from Mail 2024. Like Waydroid above, BlissOS was also satisfied with 4GB of RAM and a few processor cores.
Android Studio
To emulate a real Android device much more realistically and use the latest Android versions, you could set up an Ubuntu standalone VM and activate nested virtualisation in it as described below. Then install Android Studio in the VM, e.g. as a flatpak from Flathub. Now you can create new virtual smartphones with the Android Virual Device Manager.
I was able to create and start devices in my test, but they were so slow that they were practically unusable. Presumably this variant only makes sense on devices that have powerful hardware and, above all, a graphics card?
However, I know from other tests that - once you have got it up and running - such virtual Android devices can be used with virtually no significant restrictions.
If anyone does not know how to activate nested virtualisation for a Qube in QubesOS: In a dom0 terminal, first create the path /etc/qubes/templates/libvirt/xen/by-name/ and in this the file ExactNameOfYourQube.xml. We now write the following in this file using an editor of our choice:
{% extends 'libvirt/xen.xml' %}
{% block cpu %}
<cpu mode='host-passthrough'>
<feature name='vmx' policy='require'/>
</cpu>
{% endblock %}
Then we start the Qube once so that the file is read in. In dom0 we can then use sudo virsh dumpxml ExactNameOfYourQube | grep vmx to check whether the vmx flag is set. We can do the same within the Qube with cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep vmx.
By the way, if someone does not want to type the xml file: To copypaste from a Qube to dom0: Write the desired content in the Qube into a text file. Then use qvm-run --pass-io ExactNameOfYourQube ‘cat /path/to/file.txt ’. Then you can copy it to dom0 from the terminal.
