Android Linux Terminal adds new console options in QPR1 Beta 5

Android’s Linux Terminal is arguably one of the platform’s most overlooked features — not that that’s particularly shocking. Modern phones are all about gesture controls and increasingly abstract UIs, while a terminal interface is just about as far removed from that as you can get. For users who do take the time to tap into all the Terminal app can do, we’ve got some interesting news to share, as we take an early look at a couple changes.

The new stuff we’re checking out today first came to our attention in Android 17 QPR1 Beta 5. First up, we’ve got a small quality-of-life tweak: Google is adding the ability to select a custom font size. Considering just how heavily the Terminal app relies on text, this one feels like a bit of a no-brainer.

You’ll find the new font size option within the app’s Theming settings. Our second change is quite a bit more technical than this one. The app’s preparing an option to let you choose between the ttyd console you have now, and a virtio console.

Virtio is a high-speed interface for virtual machines that theoretically offers performance benefits over the legacy ttyd interface. But as you can see from the warning messages the Terminal app throws up when it’s selected, going this route also means abandoning some of the extra niceties offered by ttyd, like support for multiple console tabs.

There’s also the small, minor technicality of us not being able to get it to work at all at the moment. Switching over to virtio-console just constantly spits out error messages and gives us a boot log full of corrupted text. We imagine there’s probably a way to take advantage of this that’s less of a complete mess, but that’s going to take someone with a little more Linux-fu than we have to work out.

With both these changes showing up QPR1 Beta 5, odds are good that we’ll see them go wide in just a few more months with Google’s September Feature Drop.