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Trying to figure out how apps work on Android x86 in VMWare when they were compiled for ARM. Is the GUI running on Qemu? How exactly do they run if Android x86 is really x86?
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Android 11 system imagesx86: Includes both x86 and ARMv7 ABIs. x86_64: Includes x86, x86_64, ARMv7 and ARM64 ABIs.
The WOW64 layer of Windows allows x86 code to run on the Arm64 version of Windows. x86 emulation works by compiling blocks of x86 instructions into Arm64 instructions with optimizations to improve performance.
Unfortunately, the architecture of the Linux container on an ARM-based Chromebook isn't compatible with Android Studio and many other Linux apps that run natively on x86 devices.
The new Android 11 system images are capable of translating ARM instructions to x86 without impacting the entire system. This allows the execution of ARM binaries for testing without the performance overhead of full ARM emulation.
intel has released a library ('libhoudini') which translates arm instructions to x86. Then they get executed on x86 CPU.
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First thing first, Android apps (pure Java) are not actually being "compiled for ARM, just like Java apps are compiled into a intermediate Java bytecodes to to executed by any platforms that supports JVM, Android apps written in Java are compiled into Dalvik bytecodes to be run on any platform that supports Dalvik VM. In this regard, how Android apps run x86 or ARM or MIPS is similar to how Java apps run on x86, SPARC, POWER, etc.
Of course if an app contains native code, then the app would need to include support for x86 to be run on an x86 emulator or an actual x86 phone/tablet.
As for the second part of your question, remember that the OS part of Android has been compiled to the x86 platform, so I would assume running x86 Android on a x86 computer is exactly same as running, for example, a Windows in a VM when using OSX.
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