I remember a longer time ago there was an anouncement that some Ubuntu developers were planing to bring the possibility to Ubuntu to run Android Apps on an Ubuntu and planned to write an environment for this purpose.
Since this announcement i havn't heard again anything about this plans. And via Google nothing couldn't be found.
Are these plans abandoned?
The original plans were presented by Debbie Beliveau and Michael Frey. If you want to know what happened to their plans, you'd probably do best to ping them an email. Most Ubuntu developers don't bite and I'm sure they'd be happy to explain.
Actually, I'm curious about this too, so I'll send them both an email now. I'll post back with any response.
There have been rumblings of activity elsewhere since in other distributions but I've never seen anything as positive as the UDS presentation a couple of years ago.
There is a way to run some Android applications inside Ubuntu: you install the Android software development kit and run applications on a virtual device. Far from perfect but perhaps enough for simple needs.
May be http://www.android-x86.org/ running in kvm could be an answer. Better than running development kit anyway.