TL;DR

Having problems with certain apps on GrapheneOS? This blog shows my jouney with Among Us.

GrapheneOS

With Among Us being the hype recently, my friends got me to play with them. Without Google on my phone, I had to cross my fingers as usual that the application installation went smoothly. I tried downloading through Aurora Store as usual. The installation was successful but it couldn’t launch (no surprises here). At first, I thought that it was an issue without Google services, I then had it cloned to another profile that had Google services for last resort situations. I think we know what happened here, it did not run either. Too lazy to debug what happened, I turned to an Android Emulator.

Android Emulator

Trying to get it running on the Android Emulator did not seem to do the trick either. The application could not be found on the playstore and for a while I couldn’t figure it out. The error went something like: "Your device is not compatible". At least I know here that there’s some compatibility issues, I tried checking system requirements on Google Play. That’s weird, my Android version should be supported but yet it’s not running?..

Then, I tried creating another device with a different Android version, this time I settled for Android P instead of Android Q. When I runned it again, (with all the tedious setting up the device) it actually worked. This was when I tried launching the app. For a good 2 minutes, nothing happened. Then, the screen flashed the loading screen and it went back to a blank screen. I left it there for quite a while and on multiple occasions, it crashed. At least I know it’s loading but it seems like it doesn’t seem to ever load.

RAM

This was when I decided there was a need to throw in a bit of RAM, when I looked through the settings, it just so happened that I could not edit the allocated RAM 🤦. A quick search on stackoverflow showed that apparently default profiles doesn’t have configuration flexibilities. I did up a custom profile and tried to do everything once again. Unfortunately, I am back to "Your device is not compatible". Now I am really dumbstruck. I didn’t change the Android version but it does not seem to run.

ARM Translation

At this point, I believe some of you will start pointing out that Bluestacks has a working version. Well, you see, I am not on Windows or Mac. So looking through, I decided to give Genymotion a try. After a bit of onboarding, I managed to get everything working. Except the part about "Your device is not compatible". It was then that I chance upon this article. Anyways, the solution is all in there. Apparently it had something to do with 32 and 64 bit architecture.

It’s fixed

While it is now working, I wouldn’t say I am having the best gameplay experience. Keymapped wasn’t done and there seems to be a lot of lag, but I don’t think I should be complaining. Who knew this little journey of trying to get a game to run gave me the opportunity to understand Android better? I guess that’s one cool thing about messing around with software…