Mac Android Subsystem is a free, open-source app that lets you run Android apps on Mac computers with Apple Silicon, each in its own window with its own Dock icon. It takes the idea behind the Windows Subsystem for Android, which Microsoft stopped supporting on March 5, 2025, and rebuilds it for macOS.
The project is hosted on GitHub under the GPL-3.0 license. The first release appeared on October 15 and version 0.3.3 followed on October 16, with every build so far marked as a pre-release.
Android runs in the background as a LineageOS-based build and shows only the apps, without a phone-shaped emulator window. Each app also gets a Launchpad entry and a ⌘-Tab slot, so it sits alongside your regular Mac apps.
Setup Takes About Five Minutes and Needs No Google Account
Getting started follows four steps:
- Open the DMG and drag Mac Android Subsystem to Applications.
- Launch it once so it can download the Android image, which is about 1.5 GB. Tick Always Ready if you want apps to open instantly.
- Double-click an APK, APKS, APKM or XAPK file to install it, or install F-Droid, an open-source Android app store, with one click in Settings.
- Open your apps from Launchpad, Spotlight or the Dock.
Android runs in a virtual machine you never see, and each app streams into a Mac window through scrcpy. Resize the window and the app lays itself out again the way it would on a tablet. Apps are stored in ~/Applications/Android Apps, so Launchpad and Spotlight can find them.
Android’s notification shade, clipboard, controller input and permissions all map onto macOS features:
- Notifications land in Notification Center, and clicking one opens the app in its window.
- Copy and paste works in both directions between Android and macOS.
- Xbox, PlayStation DualSense, DualShock 4, Nintendo Switch Pro and MFi controllers show up as standard gamepads, with support for up to eight at once.
- Settings › Privacy shows which apps asked for the camera, microphone, location or contacts, with a switch for each one.
Four Performance Modes Decide How Much of Your Mac Android Can Use
Power Saver, Smart, Standard and Performance can be switched from the menu bar, and the change applies live without restarting Android. Smart is the default. It keeps Android ready in the background and backs off when the Mac is busy, memory is tight, the battery is low, Low Power Mode is on or the Mac is running hot.
Performance mode adds game optimizations, lower input latency and a frame rate of up to 120 fps. Power Saver only runs Android while an app is open and turns it off 30 seconds after the last one closes. Always Ready starts Android at login, so an Android app opens about as fast as a Mac app.
Android runs through QEMU on Apple’s Hypervisor framework, so Arm Android runs on an Arm Mac with no translation layer. It uses a quarter of the Mac’s memory by default, up to 6 GB, plus about 8 GB of disk space. Any Apple Silicon Mac from the M1 onward works if it runs macOS 15 or later, including the current macOS 27 Golden Gate.
Google Play Is Missing and 3D Graphics Still Run on the CPU
The Android image has no Google apps or services, so the Google Play Store is not available and apps that depend on Google Play services may not work. Apps come from APK files or F-Droid. There is no account to create.
3D graphics acceleration is software-only for now, so Android draws on the CPU and 3D games run slower than they could. Multi-touch gestures such as pinch and rotate are planned, while clicks, drags and scrolling work today. Intel Macs, iPhone and iPad are not supported.
Developers can turn on Developer mode and connect Android Studio with the command adb connect 127.0.0.1:58526, so it sees the virtual machine as a device. The roadmap lists GPU acceleration through virtio-gpu-gl, virglrenderer and ANGLE, along with trackpad multi-touch, camera, location and shared folders.
