Recently I got around to making steps toward a better mobile-PC workflow. Until now, I’ve pretty much exclusively been using the community-developed orgzly-revived app on Android. My intention was to use orgzly-revived for simple todo management and another app for more note-taking purposes—but I could never find another app I was happy with on Android. But I happened to remember reading good things about the native Emacs app on Android a few months ago. So I tried it out… and was immediately sold!
The good and bad: what to expect on Android
First, let’s make sure our expectations are tempered: Emacs on Android won’t be as pleasant as the full desktop experience. Of course. A phone’s screen is tiny, and unless you have a physical keyboard connected, you’ll have to manage with a virtual one (see Use a Special virtual keyboard). On top of that:
Tooling To have non-Emacs programs available, you have to install Emacs in a particular way with Termux to expose Termux’s binaries to Emacs. (See the recommended way to install Emacs.) The initial set up is longer, but it’s worth it. File paths Android “sandboxes” each app. You can think of each app having their own “section” of the file system that they can read or write to (unless they are given explicit access to that outside directory; see info "(emacs) Android Document Providers" ). As such, one finds themselves fiddling with the obnoxiously long Android file paths if they want to, for instance, access their notes directory that is outside the Emacs app sandbox. This is a minor inconvenience though. Writing to the file system Relatively speaking, writing to the file system can be long sometimes. Not too long, but long nonetheless, As far as I’ve experienced, this has only been the case when saving files that are outside the Emacs sandbox.
So, really, the situation is pretty good!
And finally: YMMV on other Android devices. My current phone is the OnePlus 7 Pro running Android version 12.
Installation
Option 1
The first option is as easy as it can get, but you won’t have a way to access other CLI tools:
Download the F-droid app store. For the layperson who doesn’t know what it is: it’s basically an alternative to the Play Store. Some apps that can’t be on the Play Store (fact check, maybe link tk) are there. Download the Emacs app. Open Emacs! The version of Emacs as I write this that is available is Emacs 30.1.
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