Andrew Heinzman
Just weeks after the public launch of Android 11, the flashy mobile OS is running on Raspberry Pi 4 in the form of OmniROM. It’s an impressive port, designed by maxwen of XDA-Developers and available for download today. And to our surprise, the OmniROM port works surprisingly well and has just a handful of broken features.
The hacker-friendly Raspberry Pi platform isn’t designed to work with Android. Weird, right? Developers have to piece together loose ends and create wrappers from scratch to get everything working, and even then, some stuff just won’t fly. That’s why this port of Android 11 to the Pi 4 is so impressive. It’s stable, and the majority of Android features run just fine.
That said, OmniROM doesn’t support features like accelerated video playback or screencast. It’s stuck in “tablet mode” instead of Android TV mode, and some graphics issues crop up as Mesa support for V3D is still a work in progress. We’re far away from a perfect Android 11 experience on Raspberry Pi, and most people are better off buying a pre-made Android TV streaming box like NVIDIA SHIELD.
OmniROM is updated weekly and works with standard GApps packages, although you can opt for the MicroG variant for a de-Googled experience. OmniROM supports both USB and microSD booting through a tweakable config.txt file, which you can read about while downloading OmniROM through maxwen’s XDA-Developers forum post.
Source: maxwen at XDA-Developers
