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

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

#81

Post by mdaniel »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #24
PreInternet01 wrote: post #18

So, this is the second time a "run your Android apps on Windows" initiative fizzles out: before WSA (which was Amazon-centric), there was a late-2020 "Your Phone" feature that (briefly) allowed Samsung apps on Windows desktops. 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 i…

I remember sometime in the last decade Google had an extension to run Android apps in Chrome. I tested it with a comics app, which I wanted for the bigger screen, and it worked fine. When I tried to search for the extension years later I couldn't find it.

while not as fun as "in Chrome," I can this second run quite a few Android apps in ChromeOS on my Pixelbook. They are a UI abomination, but it does give me "local" access to 1Password and a few other things which would be annoying as PWAs

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

#82

Post by mdaniel »

rdudek wrote: post #51
Tiberium wrote: post #46

Interesting to note that there's an alternative specifically for running Android games on Windows - Google Play Games [1] which is Google's official offering, and it does not rely on WSA tech so that it works on Windows 10 as well. [1] - https://play.google.com/googleplaygames

I just wish it had support for the full Google Play store and not something super limited.

"Limited" is too limited of a word: as very best I can tell from the several times I've tried it they seem to do everything in their power to cherry-pick the most spammy ad-ridden garbage one could possibly want to see from the Play Store. So, OT1H, sure, I get it, ad-tech company wants the biggest ad-vector they can get; OTOH, it still has to be something folks want to play and so their gamble did not pay off when I instaclosed their spam-store offering and saw zero ads

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

#86

Post by mdaniel »

chasil wrote: post #75
xnx wrote: post #16

I found WSA kind of handy to run Pocket Casts on old Microsoft Surface Tablet. Had to jump through some hoops to install Google Play first. 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?

Can this be run in Hyper-V? https://www.android-x86.org/

The trick to that is similar to the Intel/Apple split: just having the OS doesn't help if the apps are for a different architecture. (I'm aware of qemu/Rosetta/etc but that's not something that Android has ever tried to solve (AFAIK) - rather, they declare any native library packages at the .apk level and one is expected to pick the right installer for the right architecture)

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

#87

Post by heresaPizza »

jjordan wrote: post #40

This is such a bummer. I've been waiting to use Android apps like native apps on Windows for years since they first started teasing this. What's the next best thing?

I tried it and it was not worthy. The thing they showed the most was tiktok, that has a decent web app and looks much better on a big display. The same applies for basically all of them.

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

#88

Post by mook »

pjmlp wrote: post #35
PreInternet01 wrote: post #18

So, this is the second time a "run your Android apps on Windows" initiative fizzles out: before WSA (which was Amazon-centric), there was a late-2020 "Your Phone" feature that (briefly) allowed Samsung apps on Windows desktops. 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 i…

If you're counting that, than this is the 3rd time. The first one was Project Astoria, whose ashes gave birth to WSL.

That would have been WSL1, right? As in, the thing that tried to implement Linux syscall interfaces on top of the Windows kernel?

The current thing (WSL2) is "just" a VM (with lots of work to make it work nicer)…

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

#89

Post by nashashmi »

Tiberium wrote: post #46

Interesting to note that there's an alternative specifically for running Android games on Windows - Google Play Games [1] which is Google's official offering, and it does not rely on WSA tech so that it works on Windows 10 as well. [1] - https://play.google.com/googleplaygames

Also, LD Player is an alternative. It is from a Chinese company.

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

#90

Post by dev1ycan »

basch wrote: post #32
PreInternet01 wrote: post #18

So, this is the second time a "run your Android apps on Windows" initiative fizzles out: before WSA (which was Amazon-centric), there was a late-2020 "Your Phone" feature that (briefly) allowed Samsung apps on Windows desktops. 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 i…

I haven't tried it, but allegedly Outlook for Android runs better on Windows than the new Outlook for Windows. Which makes some sense, as one is a native app and one is a web app. https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/i-ac...

The prior mail app lacked many things/opening images and such was broken, but it was incredibly lightweight and did its job, then MS decided to kill it and add a gigabloated version of web outlook that runs worse than outlook directly on the web...

Never change Microsoft

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