Credits & Acknowledgements
September 21, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
Podroid stands on the shoulders of an enormous amount of open-source work. The list below covers the upstream projects whose code, designs, fonts, or themes are shipped inside the APK, along with the major Android-side dependencies. Every component remains under its own upstream license; see LICENSE for Podroid's own license (GPL v2.0).
If something you maintain is included here and we missed you, please open an issue or a pull request and we will fix it.
Virtual machine stack
These projects make up the actual Linux system that runs inside Podroid.
Linux kernel
Podroid ships a custom build of the upstream Linux kernel (currently 7.1.5) configured specifically for OCI-compatible containers under QEMU TCG.
- Project: https://kernel.org
- License: GNU General Public License v2.0
- Maintainers: Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel community
Alpine Linux
The guest userspace is a slightly customized Alpine Linux 3.24 root filesystem.
- Project: https://alpinelinux.org
- License: per-package (see Alpine's individual package licenses)
Container runtimes
The full rootless OCI stack ships pre-installed and pre-configured. Docker and LXC are bundled alongside Podman for users who prefer them.
| Component | Role | Project |
|---|---|---|
| Podman | Daemonless container engine | https://podman.io |
| Docker | Classic daemon-based container engine | https://www.docker.com |
| LXC | System containers (alternative to OCI) | https://linuxcontainers.org |
| crun | Fast, low-memory OCI runtime | https://github.com/containers/crun |
| netavark | Container network configuration tool | https://github.com/containers/netavark |
| aardvark-dns | DNS resolver for netavark networks | https://github.com/containers/aardvark-dns |
| fuse-overlayfs | Rootless overlay filesystem driver | https://github.com/containers/fuse-overlayfs |
| slirp4netns | Rootless user-mode networking | https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns |
| shadow-utils | newuidmap / newgidmap for rootless | https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow |
All maintained by the containers community; primarily Apache-2.0 / GPL-2.0 licensed.
System & init
- busybox: multi-call binary providing the initramfs userland and
/sbin/init(https://busybox.net, GPL-2.0) - OpenRC: service manager running as PID 1 inside the VM (https://github.com/OpenRC/openrc, BSD-2-Clause)
- Dropbear SSH: small SSH server (https://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/dropbear.html, MIT-style)
- doas / sudo: privilege escalation for
wheel-group users (OpenBSD / https://www.sudo.ws) - iproute2, iptables, nftables, bridge-utils: networking utilities maintained by netfilter.org and the Linux community
X11 desktop stack
The in-app X11 viewer is backed by these components running inside the VM. Podroid's Android side speaks RFB 3.8 directly (no third-party VNC client) and decodes the audio stream natively.
- TigerVNC (
Xvnc): combined X server + RFB server (https://tigervnc.org, GPL-2.0) - PulseAudio: audio server, exposing a null-sink monitor over
module-simple-protocol-tcp(https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/, LGPL-2.1) - font-misc-misc, font-cursor-misc, ttf-dejavu: minimum X11 fonts so apps render correctly out of the box
Emulation
QEMU
QEMU provides the machine emulation that makes everything else possible. Podroid currently builds against QEMU 11.0.4, cross-compiled for arm64 Android.
- Project: https://www.qemu.org
- Repository: https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu
- License: GNU General Public License v2.0 (and later)
- Original author: Fabrice Bellard
- Contributors: https://www.qemu.org/contributors/
libslirp
SLIRP is QEMU's user-mode network stack. Podroid links it into the QEMU binary statically.
- Project: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/slirp/libslirp
- License: BSD-3-Clause
libucontext
Bionic does not implement the System V ucontext.h API, which QEMU coroutines depend on. Podroid links against Ariadne Conill's portable libucontext to fill the gap.
- Project: https://github.com/kaniini/libucontext
- License: ISC
Limbo PC Emulator
Limbo pioneered running QEMU on Android years ago and solved many of the platform-specific issues we no longer have to. Although Podroid is a fresh codebase with a different UI and pipeline, the lineage of "QEMU on Android" traces back to Max Kastanas's work.
- Repository: https://github.com/limboemu/limbo
- License: GNU General Public License v2.0
- Author: Max Kastanas (max2idea)
Terminal & UI
Termux Terminal Emulator
The terminal layer (xterm-256color emulator, escape-sequence parsing, mouse tracking, color theme parsing) is the Termux project's terminal-view and terminal-emulator libraries, consumed via JitPack as com.github.termux:terminal-view:0.118.1. Podroid rebuilds libtermux.so locally for 16 KB page alignment.
- Project: https://github.com/termux/termux-app
- License: GNU General Public License v3.0
- Maintainers: Fredrik Fornwall and the Termux community
Color themes
Podroid ships 122 terminal color schemes covering most of the popular ecosystem (Dracula, Nord, Solarized, Tokyo Night, Catppuccin, Gruvbox, Monokai, the base16 family, and more). The themes are sourced from the Gogh project's curated collection (MIT). Individual color palette designers are credited within each .properties file.
Bundled fonts
| Font | License |
|---|---|
| JetBrains Mono | OFL-1.1 |
| Fira Code | OFL-1.1 |
| Cascadia Code | OFL-1.1 |
| Source Code Pro | OFL-1.1 |
| Hack | MIT + Bitstream |
| Iosevka | OFL-1.1 |
| Victor Mono | OFL-1.1 |
| Monofur | Free for personal & commercial use |
| Anonymous Pro | OFL-1.1 |
| DejaVu Sans Mono | DejaVu / Bitstream Vera |
| Liberation Mono | OFL-1.1 |
| Ubuntu Mono | UFL-1.0 |
| Terminus | OFL-1.1 |
Android application
Language & libraries
- Kotlin by JetBrains s.r.o. (https://kotlinlang.org, Apache-2.0)
- Jetpack Compose by Google LLC (Apache-2.0)
- AndroidX (Lifecycle, Navigation, DataStore, ViewModel, Activity Compose) by Google LLC (Apache-2.0)
- Hilt / Dagger by Google LLC and the Dagger Authors (Apache-2.0)
- Material 3 by Google LLC (Apache-2.0)
- kotlinx.coroutines by JetBrains (Apache-2.0)
Build toolchain
- Android Gradle Plugin, Android SDK, Android NDK r27c by Google LLC
- Gradle by Gradle, Inc. (Apache-2.0)
- Docker for the cross-build pipelines used by the kernel, initramfs, rootfs, and QEMU stages
Podroid
Podroid itself is developed by ExTV and contributors.
- Repository: https://github.com/ExTV/Podroid
- Website: https://extv.github.io/Podroid/
- License: GNU General Public License v2.0 (or later)
If you have contributed code, themes, fonts, or bug reports and would like to be listed here, please open an issue or a pull request.
Reporting missing or incorrect attribution
We take attribution seriously. If you believe your work is shipped in Podroid but not properly credited, or if any information above is incorrect, please open an issue and we will get it fixed quickly.