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Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

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Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#271

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…

>those not written in Java or compiled to run natively on Intel-based devices - to run on those devices

I think they mean non-x86 binaries e.g. ARM, Would still be interesting to see how the translation happens it's not like MS/Intel has silicon level advantage like Rosetta/M1 but for translating other way around.

>I was expecting a full VM / emulator, but this doesn't sound like that.

Even Google did not consider VM/emulator, The went for Android Runtime for Chrome (ARC) and then after learning that it doesn't support all features they switched to containers.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ”Games”: hard to say, because Windows is a better platform for games than Android by 10x. Note that there are quite a few commercial "Android on PC" emulators already, e.g. https://www.memuplay.com/ , https://www.bluestacks.com/ and https://www.bignox.com/ . In terms of scale, Bluestacks claim they have 50 million monthly active users which makes them pretty substantial! From https://www.bluestacks.com/promote-your…

> In China for example, iOS market share is actually constant around 20% or maybe slightly declining over the last decade So a user count comparable to 100%+ of the US phone user population?

Yes - but meanwhile Android at 70% of global mobile users (~5 billion people) has an install base more than 10x larger than the entire US population.

It is not a small market, there's (I assume) a good correlation with Windows users, and it's not a bad idea for Microsoft to be looking at potential integrations here.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I want to run Pleco on my desktop. I might also want to run wechat there, though that could run into a variety of issues.

WeChat actually has a Windows native client.

I'm aware of that.

They used to offer a way to use it in the browser, too, but that's been shut down.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Google licensed them some of the stack in return for telemetry on desktop users as well. Non-Chrome usage of desktops is a space Google can't get much data from and one they'd really want to access.

"licensed them some of the stack"? Android is open source.

They still need the store and other Google services to run apps in their native ecosystem.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Google licensed them some of the stack in return for telemetry on desktop users as well. Non-Chrome usage of desktops is a space Google can't get much data from and one they'd really want to access.

They're not even using the Play Store, they completely side steped Google and used Amazon App Store, so your theory doesn't really hold water.

Ouch... Insane lots of crapware over there.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android still uses bytecode for a lot of apps. Unless you're using Android NDK, which does have native code and requires different releases for different processors, ARM and x86 isn't really relevant. Intel even made an attempt into the smartphone CPU market with the Asus ZenFone 4 back in 2014 with an Intel Atom x86 processor running Android. Modern Pixelbooks (and other x86 Chromebooks) run Android apps fine too, a…

anbox is fine but the friction is just too great. last i tried was like year or two ago. it just ran stock apps. thats it. my question was, why cant we use manjaro or ubuntu, double click on an apk and run it like an appimage? i am asking from the POV of an end user. I dont understand bytecode or ndk. if windows 11 can freely run an android app like it was a .exe, why cant my linux machine do that? anbox aside.

Because no developers have made that feature.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#278
post #270
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the market share, not the number of tablets

What is number of tablets? The total number of shipped Tablet? Why would it matter if those tablet are not in use? Which is what the stats from Stats-counter are showing.

Market share is how much money you make. So for example if apple sells 1M ipads for $500 and android tablets cost $50, at 45.57% it would mean there are 9M android tablets sold. Which makes the proportions more like 11% ipad / 89% android.

Re: Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11

#279

"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

You need to be logged in on both stores basically
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