221–230 of 289 posts
The security implications of this are interesting. There are some apps, namely Snapchat and Instagram, that guarantee privacy by taking advantage of the phone APIs that inform the app about screenshots. You can in theory work around those today with rooted/jailbroken phones, but those are a tiny part of the ecosystem. But if everyone can run Snapchat on Windows, that kinda changes the whole game, unless they support…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will it? Has the iOS apps on M1 Macs incentivised developers to do anything, apart from just opt out of the program?
Yeah I don’t think it’s really taken off. The iOS apps that I would actually like to use on my M1 Mac have just opted out - not sure why. For MS I think this could be a modest low risk win, even if it doesn’t massively take off. It gets them at least some tablet apps, and some popular social apps for desktop, without having to incentive developers to port them.
The security implications of this are interesting. There are some apps, namely Snapchat and Instagram, that guarantee privacy by taking advantage of the phone APIs that inform the app about screenshots. You can in theory work around those today with rooted/jailbroken phones, but those are a tiny part of the ecosystem. But if everyone can run Snapchat on Windows, that kinda changes the whole game, unless they support…
This is solved by Instagram and Snapchat not being in the Amazon App Store.
But why? I can think of exactly 0 Android apps I would like to run on my Windows desktop (and I've been an Android user since the original Samsung Galaxy S). Is this really something people crave to do?
The main reason to want these apps on windows are mechanical keyboards, mice, and file processing (think loading files from your pc). In my experience, 5% of all users want this (relevant) and quite badly, in fact
I just went through my phone and there isn't a single Android app I'd actually want to use on my PC. Most of my apps are just hobbled versions of websites anyway, so I just use the fully functional browser with a full sized keyboard and nice big monitor and use the websites when I'm on the PC, and for that all I need is a single browser and the OS doesn't really matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> some simple JVM container no, there's a new NT subsystem to support this: Windows Subsystem for Android, and as you could guess from the name, it is somewhat related to WSL. the NT kernel was always designed to accommodate multiple subsystems running at once. Until WSL, there was only ever the Windows subsystem itself. soon there will be a third subsystem one can install. this is neat, to me.
Hmm, but WSL2 just runs a VM instead, right? Given that I'd have expected WSA to be a container on the WSL VM, running something similar to Anbox.
WSL1 is the "Linux as a subsystem of Windows" thing I described.
Note that WSL2 is not a complete upgrade from WSL1, and WSL2 does not render WSL1 obsolete. They each have strengths that the other does not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> some simple JVM container no, there's a new NT subsystem to support this: Windows Subsystem for Android, and as you could guess from the name, it is somewhat related to WSL. the NT kernel was always designed to accommodate multiple subsystems running at once. Until WSL, there was only ever the Windows subsystem itself. soon there will be a third subsystem one can install. this is neat, to me.
There was a posix subsystem as well in the early days, however it lacked functionality and was used as a “check that box” for procurement rather then functionality
Why though? What's the point? I absolutely don't want to run the crapware on my phone on a real computer.
None is forcing you to do that. It's a feature that if you want to use it, you'll can from W11 onward.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a posix subsystem as well in the early days, however it lacked functionality and was used as a “check that box” for procurement rather then functionality
Windows is "POSIX compliant" still, whatever that is worth. Are you sure that was a subsystem?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are few categories of apps this targets. “Clubhouse for Android” category: avant- grade apps that launch first on Android or define android platform. Nonexistent. “Median phone user ecosystem:” The TikTok Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, Snapchat, China app ecosystem and India app ecosystem. The experience of all these is bad on Windows browsers or unavailable. ”Games”: hard to say, because Windows is a…
There are some high quality creative apps on Android for things like photo editing, drawing, video editing etc. This could disrupt the space in which Adobe currently operates. Android could add a lot of diversity to windows in terms of productivity and creative apps. I think a possible advantage is also integration with Teams and OneDrive. Aandroid apps don't tend to use file stored in directory structures. You use t…