My dream would be that I can adb into my phone, install the .Net SDK or .Net Runtime (v 8 or 10) and have my applications run natively on Android. Simple console apps first, then the rest. Google should open their platform up a little bit more. Allow us to enable root access via adb. Let us unleash our pocket computer's full potentials. Would love to have portable low powered servers, running stacks of my choice. They are super efficient already, have large storages, I can already plug in a usb-c hub into my phone to get more storage, LAN network, keyboard/mouse, external mic if needed. Running my phone with wireguard/tailscale + some lightweight containers = awesome!

Unity really do need to catch up though. .Net 8/10 is really amazing and FAST. With the new garbage collector changes for .Net 10, game stutter would be nearly gone gone.

Unrelated point: I basically stream most of my games with Sunlight + Moonlight from my main rig to my phone with a controller attached, so I can play Diablo 2 remastered, Hades, Grim Dawn and basically any game with Xbox controller support, directly on my phone. Works amazingly well. Phones has high dpi screen + 120hz OLED panel and since all rendering happens on my headless gaming server, at highest settings, the phone's battery doesn't really drain at all, can play for hours. Playing a Mono based game from the play store can drain the battery within 2 hours, and the games are usually so badly built for android, even paid games that have equivalents on steam.

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bsimpson 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I believe the root constraints are a security thing. They don't want you to charge your phone in a dodgy USB outlet in a public space (e.g. an airport) and be compromised. Making you flash your phone to get root is meant to prevent people accidentally exposing themselves.

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littlecranky67 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> My dream would be that I can adb into my phone, install the .Net SDK or .Net Runtime (v 8 or 10) and have my applications run natively on Android

My understanding is that you can (almost) do that using MAUI (formerly known as Xamarin). You will not get a .Net SDK or Runtime, but the mono runtime. Since it is bundled in your app, you won't actually notice.

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BatteryMountain 13 hours ago | parent [-]

No, we need one level lower & zero mono. I want the sdk or runtime to be installed in the same way (and executable) the same way on android as on other linux distro's. .Net has ARM builds so it will work fine. This is without any specific framework dependencies (like aspnet, maui, avalonia etc) - just plain .net 8/10. It would actually be nice if android just bundled the runtime to begin with so we don't have to. They can just pin it to latest LTS versions and let it auto update now & then, same way as WebView/Google play services etc.

	▲	littlecranky67 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So for whatever reason you want the .NET runtime over Mono - not sure why that is a hard requirement, but AFAIK that is also the goal for microsoft. As in, merging those runtimes and have a single codebase that works for all platforms (including android). There are technical obstacles and historic codebases, but I would expect this unified runtime soon.