11–20 of 256 posts
I think that WSL is useful and used by many. WSA, not so sure. Who is using it? They very likely have telemetry and thus usage.
This might be the crux of it. Google probably will never port the Play store to Windows, MS doesn't want to maintain their own Android app store, and Amazon is a competitor with a pretty uncompelling app store to boot.
I think that WSL is useful and used by many. WSA, not so sure. Who is using it? They very likely have telemetry and thus usage.
I can see why WSA is not such an often used subsystem.
They killed any possible interest in this by going with the Amazon app store instead of Google Play. They also did a horrible job of advertising it. This is the first I've heard about it from Microsoft since the feature first rolled out in Windows 11 2.5 years ago.
This was the only feature of Windows 11 that was remotely interesting to me. I guess I don't have to worry about missing out on anything avoiding 11 now.
I feel like this was released just yesterday and now they are ending the support. Why?
Without Play Store it's not viable/interesting. Also, it's so. much. work. keeping up with Android releases, even inside Google. Wear and ChromeOS are always a version or two behind, and vast majority of the time, it is two versions.
If Google internally wasn't helpful enough to each other, I can't imagine they played nice with Microsoft on this.
The broad business war means there's no incentive for VPs to drive it.
Technical challenges via CTS* mean there's no incentive for 1-3 steps up the org chart to enable it.
The narrow-er business challenge of not having the Play Store is the final nail for any cooperation. I don't think Google is interested in proactively collaborating unless you do CTS.
* Android's CTS, compatibility test suite, has to be passed to get the Play Store, and broadly, it is organized around individual device launches, rather than a subsystem than can run on any hardware.
(n.b. I worked on Wear then Android at Google, 6 years total)
What's the best alternative? Bluestacks seems very shady. Chrome OS Flex in a VM? (Scratch that. It looks like Chrome OS Flex doesn't allow Android apps)
P.S. Do we make "jokes" about Microsoft killing things off like we do with Google?
Not sure if this means anything other than "phone apps run best on, well, a phone", especially since I can't think of anything from my phone that I would truly like on my desktop, other than instant messages, which are already available in various ways?
I really liked it, but I found the native version of Kindle ran better because there wasn't the "startup" hit.
They killed any possible interest in this by going with the Amazon app store instead of Google Play. They also did a horrible job of advertising it. This is the first I've heard about it from Microsoft since the feature first rolled out in Windows 11 2.5 years ago.