Anbox Cloud 1.23.0 has been released

1.23.0

The Anbox Cloud team is pleased to announce the release of Anbox Cloud 1.23.0.

Please see component versions for a list of updated components.

New features & improvements

Anbox Cloud Appliance

The Anbox Cloud Appliance is overhauled to deliver a much simpler and streamlined version. This new version of the appliance is made available using the snap epoch feature. Existing installations of the appliance are not affected but the old snap with epoch=0 is {ref}deprecated <sec-appliance-deprecation>. For all new installations of the appliance, use the epoch=1 snap. See the appliance installation tutorial for instructions.

The anbox-cloud-appliance status command now displays the initialisation status of the appliance and its version.

Seamless ADB connections

Anbox Cloud now offers a way to connect to remote Android instances securely using the Android Debug Bridge (ADB). You can set up an ADB connection using the dashboard or the CLI. See {ref}howto-access-instance for more information.

Full support for AAOS

Android Automotive OS based images are fully supported starting from this release and no longer considered an experimental feature.

Anbox Cloud dashboard

The Anbox Cloud dashboard has the following improvements:

  • The Instances and the Sessions pages and their functionalities are merged to provide an enhanced user experience while creating and streaming an application.
  • The initial VHAL values upon joining a stream are now captured as a default. You can revert to these values using the Reset button, while you are on the stream page.
  • You can easily authorise ADB connections for any stream-enabled instance from the dashboard.

Anbox Cloud charms

All Anbox Cloud charms now install Snaps directly from the Snap Store instead of using deb packages. Existing installations automatically switch to snap refresh from the store on upgrade.

Android vendor image

The Android vendor images used in Anbox are now based on Android 14. Building on the latest version of Android helps us provide the latest updates and security fixes.

Security updates

Android security updates for August 2024 (see Android Security Bulletin - August 2024 for more information).

WebView updates

The Android WebView has been updated to 127.0.6533.84.

Documentation

Our documentation is now hosted at documentation.ubuntu.com. Previous documentation links from the earlier website will soon be redirected to the latest documentation.

The documentation source is hosted at the public Anbox Cloud documentation repository on GitHub. We welcome all contributions to the Anbox Cloud documentation using this repository. See Contribute to Anbox Cloud documentation for more information.

Removed functionality

Support for EmuGL is removed with this release.

Deprecations

Use of a node controller to manage port forwarding from an instance is deprecated, starting with this release. In 1.23.0, the node controller will still be used for the full Anbox Cloud deployment. For the appliance, the Anbox Management Service (AMS) now uses a LXD proxy device to manage the port forwarding from an instance to expose a service externally or internally.

In the 1.24.0 release, the node controller will be fully replaced with LXD proxy device for both regular and appliance deployments.

Known issues

  • WiFi support is not available with any of the images. This issue will be fixed in the 1.23.1 release.
  • No crash dump is generated for the anbox session or container-manager process when running an Anbox session on ARM64.
  • Occasionally, the VHAL panel will not show up on AAOS streams. Reloading the stream page fixes the issue in most cases. In case it doesn’t, restarting the instance will fix the issue.
  • In a multi-cluster deployment that has more than one AMS, you cannot use a single web dashboard to control all the clusters in the deployment.
  • When connecting to an Android instance using anbox-connect <connection_url>, you might occasionally encounter the following error:
    Failed to communicate with the signaler:  Failed to add ICE candidate: InvalidStateError: remote description is not set
    
    Retrying the command resolves the issue.
  • In the Anbox Cloud appliance, a service declared to be publicly available in the application manifest is not exposed publicly. If your deployment is behind a NAT, you can run the following command to overcome this issue:
    amc node set lxd0 public-address <public-address-of-lxd0>
    
  • Disabling GPU accelerated encoding (setting video-encoder to software in an application’s manifest) for instances causes Anbox to fail on startup due to incorrectly linking the NVIDIA encoding libraries. See the bug report on Launchpad for more information.

Bug fixes

  • LP 2058004 Deploying Anbox Cloud dashboard fails when using AMI that has a Ubuntu Pro subscription.
  • LP 2065281 Android 13 unable to use Vulkan 1.3 despite Vulkan 1.3 being supported.
  • LP 2067314 Current amc shell is a plain bash shell and will not source any common profile scripts.
  • LP 2067316 The pprof endpoint exposed by AMS for profiling heap allocations does not expose allocs handler.
  • LP 2067252 Incorrect Error: api extension "zip_archive_support" not supported error while creating an application.
  • LP 2069021 Updating the AMS SDK to 1.21.0 prevents building the AMS client.
  • LP 2070252 When running an Android application, the SensorListener runs into a hot loop and the following messages can be seen in the logs:
    06-13 12:12:16.403 3221 3221 D SensorMonitor: Temperature Sensor value changed
    06-13 12:12:16.408 3221 3221 D SensorMonitor: Temperature Sensor value changed
    06-13 12:12:16.413 3221 3221 D SensorMonitor: Temperature Sensor value  changed
    
  • LP 2072367 When initialising the Anbox Cloud Appliance, if you provide an empty public address, invalid STUN/TURN server details are generated.
  • LP 2071903 Stream gateway swagger API is missing /1.0/sessions POST documentation.
  • LP 2072955

Upgrade instructions

See Upgrade Anbox Cloud or Upgrade the Anbox Cloud Appliance for instructions on how to update your Anbox Cloud deployment to the 1.23.0 release.

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