Today, we are announcing the first preview of our Android apps experience into the Windows Insider Program. We are proud to deliver this experience with our partners – Amazon and Intel – to Beta Channel users in the United States on eligible devices running Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm platforms.
I have my sincerest doubts about the true usefulness of running Android applications on Windows. They’ll always feel alien and disconnected from the rest of the platform, although Windows being a graphical and behavioural interface mess already, it’s probably the platform where this makes more sense than on others.
Also, the fact it makes use of the Amazon application store means you won’t get access to Google’s applications or a lot of Google Play-specific applications, so curb your expectations.
Personally, I really like this move. F
Personally, I like this move. There is a whole class of apps that I use somewhat regularly but not heavily ( not working in them for an hour or more at a time for example ). This is stuff like banking apps, expense tracking apps, note-taking apps, grocery lists, meal trackers, and the like. For these I am in and out pretty transactionally. I do not really need the power or frankly even the consistency of a desktop platform. That said, it is also pretty damn nice to not have to go to a web page ( which I probably Google even to find ), to log in, and to wait for the still annoyingly high-latency web. On my phone, it is nice to just tap to open an app, do what I want, and get out. Being able to do that at a Windows machine will be nice. As my phone is an iPhone ( work says so ), there are also Android apps I cannot get.
I can see myself having the Starbuck’s app or the Uber app to fire off a quick request before heading out ( or order lunch I suppose ). I just had to get-up from typing this to start another show for my kids on our Roku. It occurs to me that the Roku app on my Windows desktop might not be such a bad thing.
My biggest problem now is that I use Manjaro Linux more often than I use Linux. Who knows,
And why not the guilty pleasure of some wasted time in the Android version of a game or news reader from time to time. I can even see preferring the Android version of apps like Spotify or YouTube. Depending on how they work, there are some less common video conferencing apps where the Android version could be better than the web page or even Windows versions.
I have not had to rely on the Amazon Store much though. We will see how that works out.
tanishaj,
Yeah, I’ve also found the state of affairs on desktops getting worse. And it’s not really because desktops are getting worse, but because third parties like banks are taking a mobile first approach with their business. I despise this because I am so much more productive on a computer. I don’t want to do my accounting on a damn phone or even a webpage designed for one. But alas many businesses have allowed their mobile ambitions to compromise the desktop experience. The drop in information density can be very bad on a large screen
And so with that in mind, I wouldn’t ordinarily even want to run android apps on the desktop, but given the shrinking investment in desktop software by many 3rd parties, android apps may be taking over for windows ones and it seems microsoft recognizes this.
@Alfman
I feel like we agree. The desktop experience is still best for “real work” but that is declining with the emphasis on both mobile and web. The number of “desktop” applications these days that are really just wrappers around web stuff is irritating. That said, there are quite a few mobile apps ( including some that I mentioned ) which would probably never exist as “desktop” applications. Some of those would not even exist as mobile “apps” if they could not be created from a web view of some sort. The ability to run these “apps” is a win of sorts as I do see “apps” as superior to web pages for many things ( at least for now ).
I use Linux more than Windows ( typo above } and that would not be possible if not for these trends. I guess I should be thankful.
Perhaps “desktop” will rise again at some point.
@tanishaj
“I can even see preferring the Android version of apps like Spotify or YouTube”
You’d love YouTube Vanced even more I think.
https://vancedapp.com/
As I’m ditching Windows my eyes glaze over before reading anything about the latest hot must have features that have Windows Insiders (lol) drooling.
Good for you.
Ad-infested half-baked Android crap is the last thing I’d want to use on my mobile phone let alone laptop / desktop computer as well. Reading about this cancer makes my eyes wet, not my mouth.
It seems a lot of Android apps simply default to expecting GooglePlayServices being available and choking when it’s not. I’d be happy if this Windows option caused Android App developers to reconsider that behaviour.
ponk,
That’s a great point, and it sounds like you have experience running 3rd party app on LineageOS. Hard coded google service dependencies are the worst.
But in this specific case microsoft is using android apps from the amazon app store, so I wouldn’t expect there to be any google dependencies in their apps…although I’ve never used it. Anyone know?
“But in this specific case microsoft is using android apps from the amazon app store, so I wouldn’t expect there to be any google dependencies in their apps…although I’ve never used it. Anyone know?”
Depends on if Microsoft will let you side load apps. I have an Amazon tablet that I use for Kodi. Amazon do not have a Kodi app so I side loaded the Google play app plus a couple others you need. Then you can use Google play to load Android apps such as Kodi.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/06/21/install-play-store-amazon-fire-tablet/
franko,
That’s interesting. To be honest I kind of assumed they would allow sideloading, otherwise it seems much less useful IMHO, but maybe this is naive? Also, it’s unclear whether google would allow it’s proprietary services to be sideloaded on windows either. And if it did, does that mean the DRM used to restrict content would work too? So many questions…
It think it’s been really problematic that the android ecosystem has both open source and proprietary components to it. I wish they’d just open source everything, but it doesn’t seem like that’s a card google’s willing to play.
I am all for open source and all but I am feeling more and more frustrated with Android. If this works well I am even considering to buy a Windows tablet when I have to replace my Android one in a few years’ time.
Agreed. For me it is analogous to my past experience when the MS first launched it’s App store. At the time I was working for a company that made use of Windows Phone as part of a process developing real-time BI. All of a sudden I had some synchronisation between phone and desktop and seemed mostly bullet proof for the type of Apps we were building and using, one App to rule them all.
Later as I changed roles I first went to Android phone and then another move to an iPhone, I’ve really missed the seamless experience of moving between phone and desktop Apps that I had experienced earlier. I hate needing to sometimes have two or three different Apps to do the same task!
So I sort of understand why MS have chosen to move forward with this, although I agree the choice of Amazon App Store is a bit limiting, it’s not too bad though and do have some experience with Fire tablets that lets me suggest it won’t be as limiting as people think and the benefits might far outweigh the problems.
Performance of Android games on WSA is absolutely stellar! My Windows laptop is a 15″ tablet. So certain games, like League of Legends Wild Rift are a joy on it (once I shrink and reposition the controls). It runs exceedingly well, even on the Intel GPU (I haven’t figured out how to run it on the nVidia GPU yet). About 40fps at 1080p. For comparison, Bluestacks could barely manage 12fps.
I wish I could get something to run Android apps this well on Pop! OS.
(I prefer Wild Rift because the matches are shorter than the desktop version, more stream lined. The first 20 minutes of tedium is replaced by 4 minutes, and there’s more opportunity to make things happen even in that time, due mostly to the smaller map size.)
CaptainN-,
The performance of android emulators including bluestacks was so poor I just gave up on them, What microsoft has done here must be a proper port, I am very curious what the limitations (if any) of this are? Do apps like streaming, banking, and watchguard’s VPN apps work correctly (given that they sometimes won’t work on android forks).
Me too, I look every once and a while. I haven’t found anything simple and lightweight. It’s not even that I want to run android apps, but it would be good for those times I need to.
For work I was forced to get a 2nd phone and enable google services with a google account against my will just so I could get watchguard’s damned VPN authentication app to work. Watchguard’s tech support confirmed that 3rd party google play services were hard coded into their 2 factor authentication. Ugh. If the app worked on the computer, I could run it in an isolated container and wouldn’t be forced to have google services on my phone.
Another time I had a banking app that refused to run on lineageOS due to what seems to be a hard coded block.
Things like this are why voting with our feet is ineffective against duopolies since even those of us who aim to use alternatives can be coerced back to the duopolies. I wish we had better tools to run all that crap in VMs without limited our choice of platform.