Having decided to use the GoPro Quik app for short video projects , I wondered if I could make better use of it at home. On the road I can run the app on my phone or iPad. At home though I'd prefer to make use of a large monitor, keyboard and mouse. I'd also like to make use of larger, faster storage and gigabit ethernet for importing source clips. As mentioned above, the desktop version of Quik isn't very good - for a start you're limited to 1 minute long projects! I thought I might be able to run the Android app on a PC using AndroidX86. That worked well, but it's a pain to have to reboot out of my main OS into Android just for one app.

Next I decided to try virtualisation, installing Androidx86 onto various hypervisors.

1. VirtualBox - I've used this in the past for Linux VMs and it worked well. Poor performance and no hardware GPU acceleration with Android though. Video preview broken in the Quik app.
2. Anbox - Nice integration with the host OS. Apps are integrated into the host desktop, it's the same technology used to bring Android apps to Chrome OS. But the same issues with performance and the Quik app as in VirtualBox.
3. Virt-manager/QEMU/KVM - Best performance so far, really quite useable. Hardware GPU acceleration is provided through Virtio. But still a blank video preview in the Quik app.

Ultimately this experiment was a failure, there seems to be some incompatibility with the Android Media Framework that causes issues with video playback in VMs. I tried with different versions of Android and with Bliss OS (a fork of AndroidX86) so it's a bug in Android on VMs generally. All the virtual environments showed the same behaviour, which also affected video player apps like VLC and MXPlayer. Only switching to alternative third party codecs in MXPlayer worked, which sadly isn't an option with Quik.

Most of the interest in the VM arena seems to be in desktop operating systems. Hopefully Android on VMs and containers will improve as it gains more traction and users.