A clean-room, open-source Native Bridge for Android. arm64 apps run on x86_64 hosts through Chimera's interpreter and translation tier, with the same Native Bridge interface the closed-source alternatives use — but licensed so you can actually ship it.
Chimera is a Native Bridge for Android: arm64 app code is loaded through Android's own guest linker and executed on x86_64 by Chimera's interpreter and translation tier, without a separate emulator beside the runtime.
It's a clean-room, open-source implementation of the Native Bridge interface Android has shipped for years — the same interface the closed-source alternatives use — licensed so you can actually ship it.
Chimera is layered: a shared host runtime core plus thin platform frontends. Today that means an Android/bionic frontend (for AOSP devices); tomorrow a Linux/glibc frontend lets Drion host Android apps on Linux with the same translator.
Runtime lifecycle, guest ELF loading, namespace policy, proxy dispatch, and execution-engine coordination live in a single core that doesn't depend on Android properties or glibc launcher assumptions.
An Android/bionic frontend exports libchimera.so as the system Native Bridge and ships into the system image alongside the guest ARM64 payload. The same interface the closed-source alternatives use — just source-available.
Chimera brings up an interpreter first, then a translation tier with code caching. We're optimizing for apps that load and run unmodified — not for synthetic benchmarks.
ARM64 guest, x86_64 host, Android-shaped guest payload. Not a generic ARM64 userspace emulator. No ARM32. No x86 guest. No GPL or QEMU code pulled in by default. Not a drop-in copy of Google's private implementation — it's the spec-compatible, source-available one.
AOSP-based device builds and emulator products that need arm64 app compatibility on x86_64 hardware without shipping a closed-source Native Bridge.
Hosts running Android on x86 servers — including ourselves — who need a Native Bridge they can audit, modify, and re-license.
LineageOS-class projects, research platforms, and sovereign-compute builds that can't legally ship the closed-source alternative.
Chimera ships under the European Union Public Licence 1.2 — compatible with GPLv3, drafted by the European Commission, and legally sound in every EU member state.
We'll email once — when the code is public. No drip campaigns.