Your Android phone will run Debian Linux soon (like some Pixels already can)
Google introduces Debian Linux terminal app for Android. My phone’s a laptop at last!
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, ZDNet Senior Contributing Editor
Qualcomm claims that my Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus’ Snapdragon 8 Elite CPU is faster than the Intel Core Ultra 288V chip. My smartphone also has 12GB of RAM and 512GB of solid-state storage. In short, it’s more powerful than most of my laptops. So why not use it as a laptop?
Why not, indeed, says Google, which has introduced — at long last — a native Linux Terminal application in its March 2025 Pixel Feature Drop.
Of course, Android is Linux. However, it’s a mobile-first Linux distribution with a smartphone-friendly interface that bears little resemblance to the traditional Linux shell interface, never mind the Linux graphical user interfaces and their programs. That’s changed now.
Today, Linux is only available on the latest Pixel devices running Android 15. When Android 16 arrives later this year, it’s expected that all sufficiently robust Android phones will be able to run Linux. Besides a Linux terminal, beta tests have already shown that you should be able to run desktop Linux programs from your phone — games like Doom, for example.
The Linux Terminal runs on top of a Debian Linux virtual machine. This enables you to access a shell interface directly on your Android device. And that just scratches the surface of Google’s Linux Terminal…
