Android 11 Now Working On Raspberry Pi 4s

November 2, 2020 by Dave Haynes

If Raspberry Pi mini-PCs are part of your digital signage hardware mix – as a vendor, integrator or end-users – you may be intrigued by news that there is now support for the latest version of  Android on the low-cost devices.

9to5 Google reports that a developer a developer has ported the Android 11-based OmniROM operating system built to the Raspberry Pi model 4 (the latest version).

The online post suggests that previously, running Android was hard to do because of things like missing drivers.

Says the piece:

By running Android 11 in tablet mode, you can effectively have the same experience you’d encounter on any smartphone running the same OS build. It’s worth noting that this is quite different from running something like Android TV — which is tailored to media consumption rather than active and regular interaction.

OmniROM seems to run just fine on the Raspberry Pi 4, but there are some issues such as graphical glitches as a result of being stuck in “tablet mode”. Almost all other Android 11 features and functions are perfectly fine though on the Raspberry Pi, with the Play Store accessible as OnmiROM comes bundled with the Google apps package.

I believe most of the CMS companies using Raspberry Pi are using software like Debian Linux. I’m no developer – really, really no developer – but assume stable Android support (as opposed to the “I got it to work” sense this post relays) would make it broader adoption easier among CMS software shops that support Android but did not want to take on the side project of a different, though related OS. Android is derived from Linux, too.

Android version use is all over the place in digital signage. Some display companies have “smart” displays still running on just Android 4.4, while others have progressed to version 7. Sony’s Bravia pro displays run on 8 and 9.

Samsung and LG – the two biggest movers of smart displays – run on custom versions of Linux, and Android is not in the picture.