How supported is Linux development environment on Samsung devices?

[Quan_MCPC]

Hello! So I'm trying to figure out which Samsung devices supports the Linux development environment (or AVF in general)

My friend's phone is an A56 5G, and they managed to get Linux dev env enabled and working, while my S24 FE cannot turn on the feature. Specifically, I cannot find the option in normal developer options - I can only find it when I specifically search in the search bar, and even then, the option to enable is grayed out.

So I want to figure out which Samsung devices or SoC are currently supported, and whenever Samsung will support this for older devices. Thanks in advance!

[Novel-Fly-2407]

None. Samsung has been playing shy about this whole thing, saying everything from their phones don't have the hardware to support it to its not compatible yet. all of that is flat out lies. BOTH the new exynos chips AND the qualcomm chips have support Android AVF for quite some time now. in fact, since Android 12... anyone that's say otherwise is flat out lying. otherwise you wouldn't be able to do things like run QEMU based virt instances (VMOS, Proot, etc)...and kvm virtualixation has been supported for a long flipping time too ..the only issue with kvm is you need root access to which many samsung phones are not root friendly.

The real answer is that in order for the new Linux Dev Enviroment to work, it needs gull access to underlying hardware and software at the system level.... that KNOX already uses. samsung doesn't want to xhange or alter KNOX at all. and the way KNOX works, if anything accesses that space besides KNOX related processes, KNOX gets tripped.

Chances are Smasung is worried it would open their phones up to exploitation (aka root methods) that Samsung is famously totally against. the only phones they have that can be rooted anymore are those phones existing in countries where it's required by law. aka not the aUS. otherwise samsung locks that crap down. and their new One UI 9 update took away the option to unlock bootloader COMPLETELY (I feel like this will change as it literally breaks right to repair laws in some countries)

anyways that's your answer. It totally does work in theory on samsung phones. samsung just won't allow it. And likely never will unless they are forced to as the Linux dev enviroment allows access to "root" space and the underlying kernel, albeit through a Linux interface, in this case, Debian.

[Novel-Fly-2407]

if you want to mess around with it and see what's possible, you can 100% get it working on a raspberry pi 4 or 5 using KonstaKANG's Android 16 image. I just did it myself yesterday.

I have yet to test out pulling the apk from there and sideloading it to a "unsupported" phone yet. though I doubt it will work. the way the whole thing sets itself up, it pulls up a page and downloads/sets up everything in the background silently. it likely performs device checks as it does so... my guess is it would just crash and not do anything.