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Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

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31–40 of 289 posts

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#31

The article says this relies on "Intel Bridge Technology". Anyone know more about it? All I could find easily was https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/discre... Want to highlight one paragraph from that description: "Intel Bridge Technology is run-time post compiler that can be integrated into Android-in-Container to enable certain Android apps – those not written in Java or compiled to run natively…

I feel like that’s Rosetta 2 for PCs.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#33
post #14

This is neat but I'm struggling to think of a case where this would be useful.

BlueStacks claims to have more than 500 million users, I know a few friends who use it to play mobile only games on their PC for example. If android emulation was so useless on Windows, it wouldn't be so popular

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#36

The article says this relies on "Intel Bridge Technology". Anyone know more about it? All I could find easily was https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/discre... Want to highlight one paragraph from that description: "Intel Bridge Technology is run-time post compiler that can be integrated into Android-in-Container to enable certain Android apps – those not written in Java or compiled to run natively…

My guess is that apps written in java/kotlin are easy to run in a x86 compatible android runtime.

The difficulty is for native code, the arm libraries embedded in many apps. Actually most Android app depends on native libs. For image processing for example. Nearly all games are using native arm binaries.

The sentence you quoted is probably related to native code only, which is the difficult part. It looks like they have some magic tricks to make them work on x86 architecture with having to recompile the libs.

Intel used the same tricks in their x86 android devices a few years ago, you could run arm native code on their x86 android versions transparently.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#37

"Android apps will run natively on Windows 11 and will be downloadable from Amazon’s Appstore, via the new Windows Store that’s included in the operating system." - confusion intensifies

I understand it in this way: you will find all Android apps published in the Amazon store also inside the Windows Store. So there is no need for republishing all Android apps to the windows store.

They partnered with Amazon. Google probably wasn’t helpful in integrating the play store.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#38

If anything, Amazon knows this will really incentivize updating your Android app on the Amazon App Store, or bringing it there if you haven't. And that's good for us because, should the Amazon App Store become more viable for manufacturers, Google might find themselves increasingly losing control of Android, and increasingly forced to make the Play Store more competitive.

Will it?

Has the iOS apps on M1 Macs incentivised developers to do anything, apart from just opt out of the program?

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#39

If anything, Amazon knows this will really incentivize updating your Android app on the Amazon App Store, or bringing it there if you haven't. And that's good for us because, should the Amazon App Store become more viable for manufacturers, Google might find themselves increasingly losing control of Android, and increasingly forced to make the Play Store more competitive.

Google's well on their way to replacing Android, no? I thought a lot of their announcements at events the last couple years had been about their from-scratch Android replacement. Maybe another big company will pick it up, but if not, I don't see much benefit to the hobbyist community over the current status quo if Android gets "opened up" more but also loses 99+% of total corporate backing toward its development. Eve…

I don't think Google is in a position to "replace" Android. They simply don't control the hardware; they can ship Fuchsia to their Home assistants and thermostats, but when it comes to phones and personal computing devices, they don't have many cards to play (beyond Pixel, like 0.5% of the Android market). The power lies with hardware manufacturers and developers.

Their new wearables partnership with Samsung may help here. Maybe Samsung would play along with a new Fuchsia phone OS. But there's still the developer issue; any new OS like this would need Android-backward compatibility support exactly similar to what Microsoft is doing here. "Android" in this sense doesn't mean "the OS"; its the application system.

What's happening in the Android world right now is so healthy and excellent, I almost can't believe its the product of Big Tech. Google is already pushing Android apps on ChromeOS, now Microsoft has them on Windows, through the Amazon app store, and nowhere in any of this is the actual Android Operating System. The comparison here isn't Android vs iOS vs Windows; its Android vs Flutter vs Web. Its a new way of writing "native"-adjacent multiplatform applications; the OS doesn't matter anymore.

Sure the touch-friendly UI will suck in some applications, on some deployments of Windows. That's not Android's fault; its on the developer to recognize the input method and canvas size, and adjust accordingly. I hope more do!

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#40

The article says this relies on "Intel Bridge Technology". Anyone know more about it? All I could find easily was https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/discre... Want to highlight one paragraph from that description: "Intel Bridge Technology is run-time post compiler that can be integrated into Android-in-Container to enable certain Android apps – those not written in Java or compiled to run natively…

> How many Android apps out there are not written in Java?

Lot of apps use natively compiled libraries through NDK.

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