Virtualize Android on an Android device and then share the VM image to another device?

Question

I just installed VMOS on my Android phone. Now I have created a virtual machine that I want to run on a different device as well. Usually when you run VM-software you can more or less just copy an image between machines and then execute exactly the same VM on a second device by selecting this image when launching the VM-software.

However, in VMOS I can't find the image file nor find an option to select a specific image file to launch. Am I missing something or does VMOS not support this? Are there any other alternatives for Android that allows me to setup a VM on one device and then use it on other devices?

Answer 1

If the images are located on the shared sd-card section you can directly access and copy them using a connected PC and set USB mode to files/MTP mode.

If the images are located in the app-private data folder you don't have direct access to them But Android VMOS app contains the entry android:allowBackup="true" in it's manifest so even on unrooted devices you can get all data used by the app.

Connect your Android phone to a PC with installed AndroidSDK or ADB minimal, enable Developer menu and Android Debug Bridge (adb) on the phone and execute the command:

adb backup com.vmos.web

It will create a file named backup.ab that contains all the files from app-private data folder that you can't access directly from a PC.

If you want to copy VMOS to a different phone, enable adb in it and restore VMOS including data using

adb restore backup.apk

You can also view/modify the created backup.ab file by converting it to a TAR archive (and back to an .ab file) using Android Backup Extractor (abe).