Frequently Asked Question

Is Android really Linux?

Technically yes, ecosystem-wise no. Every Android device, and there are more than three billion in active use, runs a Linux kernel that descends directly from upstream kernel.org sources, with patches maintained as the Android Common Kernel. Google has been pushing those patches back into mainline for years, and the gap between the Android kernel and Linus's tree is much smaller than it used to be.

Above the kernel, however, Android looks nothing like a typical Linux distribution. There is no glibc (Android uses Google's Bionic libc), no GNU coreutils, no Bash by default, no X11 or Wayland (SurfaceFlinger handles the display), no systemd (Android's init reads init.rc), and applications run in the Android Runtime (ART) on top of the Linux process model rather than as ordinary ELF binaries the user launches directly. If you count Android users as Linux users, Linux is by a wide margin the most-used operating system on Earth, but a Debian sysadmin would not feel at home inside one.