Cutting to the chase:

I was unable to find any information about how to run BOINC on Android - specifically, using the official Berkeley installer (.apk) on not a tablet, but a smartphone.

Granted, my particular phone is often referred to as a "fablet" (or "phablet?") i.e. "phone-tablet," as it's rather large in size. The screen itself is larger than an iPhone 4S. I have an HTC Droid DNA, which is comparable to the perhaps more commonly-seen Samsung Galaxy SIII. They are like a Nikon DSLR and a Canon DSLR. When it comes to brass tacks, hard to pick a clear winner.

In any case I happen to know my phone has a "quad-core CPU." Granted, I'm not entirely sure there are even any apps for Android in existence which can actually address all four...but I thought that if anything could, it'd be BOINC (hopefully).

I also happen to know that many, many people run / have run / continue to run BOINC on their smartphones - often models older than mine!

However, I installed the BOINC package from Berkeley (which I do recognize is a development release) and attached to a few projects that I knew to support Android.

All I'm getting is "This project does not support computers of type arm-android-linux-gnu."

hmm?

That and there's no way to edit computing preferences (I will NOT "root" my device - afraid I can't go into the exact reasons here though) that I can see, so for all I know it IS recognizing "four cores" but only using one, which I believe is the default setup (use "0%" of multi-core systems, i.e one core)

Here is my "host" at SubSetSum, which was specifically recommended to me for Android.

Here is another "host" at the same project with what appears to be an older (albeit apparently faster) CPU as well as an older OS, and it's gotten more credit than my quad-core i5-2350M 2,3GHz has in less calendar time! O_o

What on earth am I doing wrong here?

I assume I need to use an anonymous platform, but without direct access to the /data/ directory, I see no way so to do.

I also assume I need to change my computing preferences, but I cannot find a way to do that either.

I know there are other versions of BOINC for Android out there, but it's late and I'm just gonna leave this here for now and experiment with other apps tomorrow.

If I'm missing something obvious, please be nice about it...I tend to blow things out of proportion until I end up blaming things like overheated DIMMs and unstable overclocking and other irrelevant things.

tl;dr they told me this is a super-powerful phone; they are correct; it won't crunch; I would like it to; halp

:)

---

Oh felt I should mention that in the meantime I am simply using NativeBOINC, which appears to be working properly thus far.

If it's simply a matter of the official Berkeley version missing some kind of feature set specifically for my kind of phone, okay.

So it looks like this on a project. Cool.



All that said, I'm definitely interested in the porting of BOINC to Android in some kind of native form. I will definitely keep up with the progress and all!

---

Hi there,

I've forwarded your posts to the developers.

In the mean time, you may want to look at AndroidBOINC Implementation, AndroidBOINC To Do and possible even Build Android Client and Manager for documentation. And yes, do know that the version presently available is in alpha state. Perhaps even a pre-alpha. It's far from being finished.

---

Okay!

So I'm using NativeBOINC, which is really quite well-written.

It comes pre-bundled with up-to-date binaries for all current projects supporting ARM architecture - unofficially of course, but they run.

Well, they run, but not for very long, and the results aren't always usable. I'm only doing WUProp and SubsetSum WUs, and the former gets tons of computation errors (no output file) and SubsetSum WUs don't error out, but often return results that are simply wrong! It's a mathematical project, which leads me to believe the tasks done by ARM machines are quite literally doing incorrect math...how odd.

If I wasn't so preoccupied with my own current coding project(s), I'd offer all the help I can! I won't be that busy for much longer, I sure hope, and since my next endeavor involves Android coding / porting of applications I've already written, I see no reason why I can't include at least some BOINC testing :)

Thanks for the reply!

Meanwhile, the developers should "invest" in some of those little Android mini-PCs - like this - and by "invest" I mean politely request what's essentially petty cash from the operating budget. :P

There are Android boards targeted at developers! It's the future of portable computing, meaning computers that you can put in your pocket and carry around...I'm sure they already know about this but in case they didn't, now they do! I'm thinking of the Hackberry A10 and suchlike. I want one myself, and if I'm considering it, it must be affordable. heh.

I suppose Android is simply proliferated further than iOS and Windows CE or Windows Mobile or Windows Embedded. Not surprised. Well in any case I'll certainly be keeping up with all the developments!

---

Answers from the developers:

Rom Walton wrote:

Actually current NativeBOINC state is close to perfection from features point of view. User can "just crunch" with it, not to fight with some missing and bugs. The main issue now is lack of scientific applications ports.

IIRC, the default mode of operation for NativeBOINC is to run all applications as anonymous platform applications. From an eco-system perspective it kind of limits NativeBOINC to running applications that are OSS software.

Now this is probably the result of a chicken/egg problem where projects were not quite as ready to jump on the Android bandwagon. Anonymous platform was the only route left open.

Several projects use software that is not OSS software in nature.

Anyways, we'll be flipping the bit that allows for external memory installs
And see what happens.

According to this (section: android:installLocation) [url]
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/manifest-element.html[/url]

even if the apk file is stored on the SD card, the data directory which allows
for native applications to have the execute bit set, is still setup in internal memory. So it may well be that NativeBOINC and the BOINC package we are putting together have the same limitations as far as phones with smaller memory sizes goes.

Or they may both be operating under a different set of constraints due to how
project applications are installed with the anonymous platform mechanism.

We just need to try and see what happens.

David Anderson wrote:

In BOINC for Android, one of the goals is to dynamically
download and run client applications, as on other platforms.

Android external storage, by default, can't be used for executable files. So the boinc/projects/ directory must be on internal storage.

Notes:

- in principle we could split the project directories:
one part for executables, another for data files. Data files could go on external storage. However, this would be a large rewrite.

- slot directories could go on external storage, but there's no advantage because they just contain links to the project directory.

Okay, the storage issue certainly makes sense. It doesn't explain why I was unable to get any work, but after more research noticed you are quite right in that there are very extremely few projects which currently offer a specific Android app. A couple offer apps for Linux on ARM, but they are usually the same projects with Android apps.

Hmm. I do need to learn more about how Android actually works. Knowing that will change how I develop my own apps ultimately.

Thanks for the replies, developers and all!

---

I run milkyway on Native bonic no problems there. the others always seem to have problems:(

I downloaded the official distribution of BOINC client for Android from BOINC download page, installed it on my Samsung I9001 Galaxy S Plus, looked for projects which support Android platform from Choosing BOINC projects page, found Asteroids@home and OProject@Home as projects which supports Android platform.

I had reservations against OProject@Home which is detailed in this OProject message board thread.

So, I charged the phone battery to full and left the phone plugged in to power outlet, went ahead and added Asteroids@home to the BOINC client, I got one task downloaded, which I was able to run to complete successfully. Got credit as well. Crunching the second task now. You can see the details of my host in this page.

I downloaded the official distribution of BOINC client for Android from BOINC download page

Forgot to mention that the version I downloaded was BOINC 7.0.58