Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA)

They also killed the forwarding of SMS years ago, so when you get an SMS you have to get it through the Voice app

WSA wasn't intended for calls or messaging. It was intended to allow developers who had developed apps for the Fire tablets to also provide or sell the apps on Windows.

It was also an alternative way for Android developers to write and test code on Windows. You could edit/deploy faster to WSA than to an Android emulator. And WSA apps are resizable, which is handy for seeing how well your code could handle different Android layouts.

The drawback was that WSA did not have any Google Play services. So no map, no Android push notifications, etc. That could have been addressed if Google wanted to license all of the Play bits.

On the one side: Microsoft seems to be trying to work towards feature parity with New Outlook but its an application being built in the open with the most agile of agile and there's no clear time horizon of when that parity will happen. Every month or so there's new features and more feature parity (it likes to tell you that, too).

On the other side: Old Outlook grew to be an organic mess of COM components, duct tape, and glitter. Some of those COM components that people think of as "native functionality" was second-party and third-party components written by a weird grab bag of companies, including some that no longer exist. Expecting full feature parity from Outlook sounds to me like an impossible task, especially because how can Microsoft know all those third-party components? It almost seems like a case where a new brand might have been better, but it's also hard to blame Microsoft with realizing that they have a lot to lose if they kill the Outlook brand.

(I'm willing to bet S/MIME was based on fragile old IE code. I'm somewhat happy in New Outlook now, but I find I keep having to switch to Old Outlook for silly "required" corporate Add-Ins that use old APIs and haven't upgraded yet/give the impression that they might not upgrade ever.)

WSL1, which no one should use right now, may and should be deprecated. However, WSL2 should not go away since it has completely transformed the dev experience for the better.

> - be easily ported to different hardware architectures, which then never actually became relevant

Commercially relevant, perhaps, but it has remained technically relevant: The NT Kernel has historically operated on lots of different hardware architectures and continues to run on a small variety today. The ARM port is still active and a living branch even if total hardware sales are fewer than projected and Microsoft ceded most of that hardware space commercially when they gave up on Phones.

> - have a much more sophisticated and elaborate security model than those filthy unices (and now we're getting sudo on Windows, because 30 years later, it's still too complicated for anyone to use as intended)

That "sudo for windows" still leverages the elaborate Windows ACL model. It's not like they are also porting Linux kernel security on top of Windows. They just realized that both "RunAs.exe" and PowerShell's "Start-Process" have more complicated CLIs than necessary for simple UAC cases and decided to copy the CLI arguments of a well known CLI.

> - allow fluid switching between different userlands, be it win32, OS/2 (RIP), Unix (RIP), and anything else you could want in the future! (except no, you're getting VMs now)

Turns out users don't actually want to switch userlands on the fly and when they do VMs feel more right as an abstraction?

More (RIP) than OS/2 or the various attempts at POSIX userlands, Windows 8 actually tried to deliver a truly modern userland as a wholesale new experience, failed spectacularly. Switching was fluid and felt good if you enjoyed the new userland (which had some extraordinary, noticeable benefits in bootup and power/battery usage and other things). Coordination between the two userlands got really good in 8.1. The final lessons that seemed to come from Windows 8 was to never try that again because users hated it and didn't understand it. (I still lament how much of "didn't understand it" was so much more of a failure of education and PR and marketing and incidentals more than technical problems. There was some great technical appeal of a chance to move from win32 to a userland that was greener [both as in pastures and ecologically].)