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 instant messages, which are already available in various ways?
> especially since I can't think of anything from my phone that I would truly like on my desktop
The SMS and Calls.
Seriously, at this point, my phone is the least useful device I own for managing both of these functions. The only utility in having them in some broken down hard to use form is for the slight convenience of being able to use them outside of my home if I wanted to. I rarely want to. I'd much prefer these functions to be on my PC.
It'd also mean I could just ignore my phone much more effectively and just pick up on everything at my desk when i get home.
I use KDE connect for that on Windows too, it does both SMS and calling. Your phone only needs to be in the same network which isn't an issue on your desk when you get home.
I use the GConnect implementation of KDE Connect and it works really well... except for the SMS forwarding.
It has all the usual issues of this kind of mirroring software: (1) once in a while it falls out of sync. (2) the messaging UI is really spartan (and for some reason doesn't support OS-level spell check?) (3) MMS support is either spotty or missing (4) notifications occasionally just stop happening.
I'm still grateful for it and use it everyday, but GConnect is #1 on my list of "once I get some time to do OSS stuff again".
How exactly do you do SMS and Calling on Windows? I have KDE Connect installed, and it has SMS and telephone integration checked, but I don't see any notifications or anything. https://i.imgur.com/JQphE16.png
This is largely how I've operated for years with Google Voice: doing all of my SMS/MMS messaging and outbound calls (inbound, not so much) from the voice.google.com web app in my desktop browser.
If my life circumstances were a bit different, I could happily live without a phone and minutes+data plan. As it is, my wife would not approve...
My primary number has been a Google Voice number for a decade, and when I do use my actual phone for SMS/MMS and calls, I'm using the Voice app on there too.
NOTE: Google Voice only works for personal Google Accounts in the US and Google Workspace accounts in select markets. Text messaging is not supported in all markets.
I’ve been using Google Voice this way too since 2011. Recently I have been considering porting my number out as the iOS app has become incredibly slow to the point of almost nonfunctional. Have you had a similar experience?
I'm on Android. The Android app has never been very snappy nor bug-free for me (I've also used older, low-end phones, for what that's worth), but I think it has generally gotten better over time.
+1
I hate having to switch between my phone and desktop which feels like a waste of time when I'm already at my desk, which is almost all 7 days a week.
I would like to have my phone only be used for calls and SMS and nothing else. All the messenger apps, email, browsing is better off on my desktop.
Typing on phone and doing anything that involves multiple apps is much more work compared to using a desktop.
We are starting to offer a new product for this for small business/startups.
It is still pretty early and we're just starting to expand into the US, but it is something (https://nucleus.com/).
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.
Yeah I don't know how they plan to shaft business users with that. It's so slow.
I noticed recently that Microsoft relented and soon starts introducing CoPilot features into old outlook (or 'real' or 'full' outlook as people are calling it at work). Previously it was coupled to 'new' outlook only to promote adoption. But it really sees a lot of pushback from users. I hope this will continue into not canning the real outlook at all.
Microsoft are always pushing 'more change management' as a 'solution' but some changes are simply not good and it's normal for users to resist. If anything they push too much (like turning on features by default, and sending reminders that you have not used feature xyz enough last week through Viva Insights)
And the skullduggery they're doing with the consumer windows mail migration (pulling the user's email into their cloud without making this very clear) is totally out of line IMO.
Personally I don't even hate the web version so much. I use it daily because Microsoft never made a native outlook for my platform anyway. But I'm not a heavy user of mail and I do see its limitations.
its sort of the business model at this point. you cant just subscribe to security updates without new features. to justify the cost they always have to cram new, and by new i mean change.
google feels the same way. things that work need to be rebuilt and rereleased to justify headcount.
the mail -> new outlook is just another in the long tradition of microsoft pushing a new native gui framework, only to abandon it in house. How can they ever expect developers developers developers to commit to another future abandonware.
New Outlook still doesn't handle S/MIME. That means it's between annoying to useless in large companies, depending on the volume of such e-mails you're getting.
What email client is popular in large enterprises then? Last time I worked in a company like that it was all microsoft software, including outlook, by policy
Here's the thing though: Microsoft is rather heavy-handed about pushing "New Outlook" and "New Teams". New Outlook is mostly just a wrapped webapp - so slightly cleaner than the old one, but otherwise much slower and less functional. Now, guess which Outlook has had support for Copilot for the past couple months? :).
Right now it's mostly an annoyance - I have to switch back and forth couple times a day, depending on whether I need "snooze e-mail" or S/MIME at any given moment. But the latter is really a dealbreaker. Strange for a product sold to corporations, which makes me think that MS is planning to get people off e-mails entirely.
Yeah new teams is much less of an annoyance in terms of change as it was already a slow web app and users don't really expect much from it. And the UI didn't change at all.
They bogged it down with too many features and now they're trying to scrape it up by having a slightly more optimised framework, which is basically still exactly the same, it's now just based on edge instead of chrome which we all know are really the same thing under the hood anyway.
So where new teams is just a cutesy little badge on the same thing, new outlook is really a serious deprecation.
And yeah they're trying to get people off email for sure. Microsoft even have banners of "don't mail but teams" under their consultants' emails.
Makes sense from a strategic perspective to move from an open platform to something they fully control and own. It's the old lock-in game they've always played, after their initial strategy of Embracing Extend failed on email (they made a huge attempt but Google was very successful so the same and now there's a kinda duopoly stalemate they can never win)
> Yeah new teams is much less of an annoyance in terms of change as it was already a slow web app and users don't really expect much from it. And the UI didn't change at all.
They still broke some things. Instead of custom contact lists in Chat, you're supposed supposed to use the People app, and until just right now, that one didn't (!) show the presence status of each contact. It seems that very very recently they've finally fixed that, although it's still less compact and at-a-glance than the old contact list.
And "Notify when available" is annoyingly missing in New Teams, too.
If Apple can have feature parity between a Mac-ass Mac app and a Web app, why can't Microsoft? Why does Microsoft need to reduce its feature set to the lowest common denominator?
I'm of course talking of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.
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.)
Microsoft love to force things onto end users these days. The latest thing is the "focussed inbox". Suddenly our school had it enabled and a whole bunch of people didn't see their emails as it hived them off to the Other tab.
Yeah and their evangelisation makes it really hard to opt out. They're always making it a show to portray users not using it as slowpokes who don't keep up.
Even though I don't want Microsoft to decide what's important and not in my inbox. I get so little I can easily do that myself because I block any and all unsolicited sales attempt forever - which Microsoft is trying to make harder because those people are their customer too! For while the 'new outlook' didn't even have the block sender option. Only the less severe report spam. But I want to block them (and ideally their entire company) forever.
This strategy works great for me and I often gloat over my trash folder with the many sales emails there "I know you're busy, you probably forgot to respond to my 20 previous emails but I proposed you another meeting, does tomorrow 2:00 suit? Here's the invite!". I love seeing them waste their time. Most of them seem actually manual even (despite most not even seeming to have bothered reading what I actually do)
I really hate Microsoft's approach to change management. They're only advocating what's best for them, not for the users. There's no win-win here, it's all them and they don't even attempt to hide it except under a really thin sleazy sales veneer.
> I noticed recently that Microsoft relented and soon starts introducing CoPilot features into old outlook (or 'real' or 'full' outlook as people are calling it at work).
I thought they were done developing the old outlook since they started hacking it instead of doing things properly. For example, in the rounded corner update for the old outlook, they started drawing black squares over message pane during resizing, probably to hide visual defects.
Glad to know there is a chance that they might keep the old outlook around.
I'd assume that would probably be more that "CoPilot all-the-things" took priority over "leave Outlook in maintenance-only mode".
Even the "round all the corners" changes seemed mostly "free" from component library upgrades from changes in other Office and Windows apps and components shared with "New Outlook" (on the one side: people keep assuming New Outlook is a bloated web app, especially because it has a lot of UI consistency with Outlook.com now, but there's a lot of evidence it is more complicated that just a web app; on the other side: a lot of those painting problems especially during resizing relate to Old Outlook has been partly "a web app" for a long time; hybrids apps are hybrid).
Slow is the least of its problems. There are missing features all over the place. For instance, you can no longer drag emails to the desktop or into another app.
Still using the Outlook application installed on Windows. Recently purchased Office 2021 (for $40, they had a sale) which came with the Outlook application. It does get updates every now and then so I know they're still supporting it. I've been using the Outlook application for a few decades, no plan to stop, and I will never use their online version.
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...
I can say that New Outlook is slow as fuck, does counterintuitive things (especially with actions on multiple selections), and has hordes of other somewhat annoying bugs (for example, deleting many emails will often count you as a double click.
The very latest and greatest version of Outlook, has broken Search. Not in a subtle way, no, as in the "remove focus from the goddamn text box after you've typed a couple of characters" kind of broken.
I've had to remove and re-add accounts to fix Outlook issues more than all other email client issues combined. This is especially prevalent with the mobile versions.
Do you know how many times I've had to reset the view after Outlook, for no reason discernible, decided to change it, delete it or simply corrupt the file. I stopped counting after I had to start using scientific notation.
We'll continue to disagree on the App versions of Outlook.
The web version is ok.. I will agree with you on that point.
Agreed. Outlook native gets extremely confused when the desktop resolution/scaling changes. It also uses as an old version of IE/Trident (?!) to render HTML e-mails, which is very painful to work with when trying to build rich e-mail notifications.
There are plenty of applications I would like to run in a completely sandboxed environment separate from the blast radius of my phone. Anything by Facebook would be a given. Chat applications which still do not have a serviceable web interface. Whatever.
> As in, the thing that tried to implement Linux syscall interfaces on top of the Windows kernel?
It's really funny, NT was supposed to be great at three things:
- be easily ported to different hardware architectures, which then never actually became relevant (and nowadays macOS is the best example for actual architecture migrations!)
- 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)
- 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)
The issue with VMs for Linux, which Windows isn't the first, rather the last from several attempts done by UNIX vendors, and IBM/Unisys mainframes/micros is that Linux kernel syscalls have become more relevant than POSIX.
Thus it is easier and cheaper to plug a Linux VM, than implement POSIX, and then get the same kind of complaints from Linux folks using macOS, or other UNIX proper environments.
> - 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].)
As someone that believed into the WinRT dream, I am deeply sour with how WinDev managed the whole story, it wasn't only the users not wanting to adopt the new world.
Microsoft itself made a mess out of the developer experience.
Now I am back to distributed computing, and for anything Windows the classical frameworks are good enough.
>macOS is the best example for actual architecture migrations
Eh, they did 2 migrations while supporting at most 2 architectures concurrently. Nothing compared to Linux which is maintained for x86, POWER, ARM, s390x, MIPS etc concurrently
Does Linux allow you to run your s390x binary on your ARM system? No.
As others have pointed out macOS allowed migration including existing binaries. They have done 3 of these migrations. 68k to PowerPC, PowerPC to x86, and x86 to ARM. Each time, users were allowed to bring along existing binaries and keep using them and each time the binaries from the previous system generally ran as fast or faster on the new system. As far as I am aware, Linux has never done anything like this.
There are applications for that on Linux (qemu and box64/box86 being the best known), they just aren't installed by default on most distros.
A large part of why the binaries ran well on macOS migrations is that each time the migration came with a substantial processor speed increase. This meant that emulated/translated binaries were able to roughly match their previous performance, while native binaries for the new architecture were significantly faster. On Linux, however, the most common reason for cross-architecture tech these days is running x86 binaries on something like a Raspberry Pi, which means a slower processor on top of the translation layer - so non-native apps see a huge drop in performance.
macOS did migrations. Linux is just supported on those architectures at the same time without any real layer that allows users to switch from for example x86 to ARM without recompiling the entire world to match.
But contrast that to Microsoft's absolutely hilariously inept attempts at bringing Windows to ARM. The amount of cumulative money spent over the last 15 or so years versus the actual market penetration is insane.
Not super well supported, but there's a Samsung Dex app for Windows and MacOS (I think unsupported now) that let's you plug your phone into your computer, and get Dex in a window. Runs the phone apps on the phone, gets your android store etc. but you get an "ok" minimal desktop that lets you do your phone stuff with a mouse and keyboard.
After I figured that out I basically dropped all the run Android on a desktop things.
I have never in my life seen an app that cared about adb being enabled. I'm willing to believe that you've encountered them, but I'm gonna question "most programs".
"especially since I can't think of anything from my phone that I would truly like on my desktop"
Wyze doesn't support viewing their cameras on PC without a bunch of fiddling. I downloaded the app and was running within 20 minutes of having the idea. The usability isn't the best, but having it on my desktop is has been a real time saver with a new puppy.
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
> 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.
This feature still exists and it works. It's partly developed by Samsung, so that's why it works.
I was using the Google Photos map search via BlueStacks on my Windows machine briefly, but that's only because Google made the perplexing decision to not put that on desktop.
Most of these use device attestation anyways so they are unlikely to run on Windows. The bank wants to ensure that the user doesn't have root access which isn't the case on Windows.
> 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?
Sometimes I go to this coworking space. They have an iOS/Android app you need to use to book a desk, message the admins, unlock the front door, pay, etc. No web app. Forces me to get my phone out when I’d rather just stay on my laptop. If I could run their app on my laptop (haven’t looked into it yet), I’d like that
You can do that in a webapp too. At first login, you have to click "Agree" to lengthy terms and conditions displayed. Until you click "Agree", your login session is only good for the terms screen, not the rest of the webapp.
"Your phone" feature still works. Apps don't run on your PC but are displayed on the PC desktop from your phone. I have a Samsung phone and use this feature dialy.
There are a huge number of phone apps which are not on the desktop and you have to use them on your phone. Tons of banking apps, e.g. Cash App, Venmo etc, are not supported on the Web. Other apps, like TikTok have Web versions which are so broken to the point where they are unusable.
I have to keep a Chromebook to be able to run Android apps on the desktop, unless anyone has another solution?
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.
> especially since I can't think of anything from my phone that I would truly like on my desktop
One thing that immediately comes to mind are streaming apps. Most providers don't offer windows apps and the websites don't allow downloads, which is very annoying for laptops/windows tablets.
> especially since I can't think of anything from my phone that I would truly like on my desktop
Games.
There are a ton of games that are mobile-exclusive for absolutely no reason other than reducing developer workload by staying confined to one platform, and work great on emulators.
Duolingo restricts some features to the app only and not the browser. Hinge dating app only provides app and no browser option. I am sure there are other examples of use cases.
They created a huge buzz around it, took over a year to release and when they did so, released it to the wrong Insider ring, so everyone who was on the fast ring specifically for and waiting for it had to re-install.
I believe, without any proof, that this is why they had to redo their rings and what they meant shortly after.
Then there is everything else people have mentioned, with them being completely reliant on Amazon's store but requiring "something" where most of the apps that are on Amazon's mobile store weren't available.
I ended up in the right ring to get it on ARM, and actually used it (Kindle app on Surface Pro X). But that was the only app I used. The other one I really wanted was O'Reilly Safari/learning, their e-reader. But of course the Amazon app store is going to shut down before they allow a competitor's app on there.
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)
I could be wrong, but I thought passing CTS is only one of the steps to be able to advertise a device as powered by android. To get Play Store which requires GMS, there are additioinal test suites like GTS.
I imagine not only is this a technical challenge in general, but the "best" apps require google integration and google is giving devs and big companies incentives to require the google play libraries, which this can't use. This has been google's main dirty trick since the beginning, which is why you don't see much competition in the android space. Its a few big licensed players. Niche, homebrew, emulated, etc players aren't going to get google certified. Android has just become MS from the 90s. Google is a crony capitalist tough guy as much as MS or Oracle or Apple, it just has better PR as being "friendly" and "open."
MS also is clearly bribing/paying for big apps to come to its Windows platform via the Windows store, so why bother with this Android middle-man that is all trouble? Eventually the big apps got to Windows Store and that's really all that matters to 90% of customers.
Everything about this project was doomed from the start. I think MS just has given up on apps and mobile and leaves that to Apple or Samsung, who are now just caretakers for ios and android at this point and mobile becoming a low/no profit commodity in the long run, outside of payment processing.
Not popular but usable now they allow any kind of application and not just "modern apps". Main benefit that applications update automatically but even though I do install apps via the store I don't ever remember finding apps through it. Maybe discoverability is just bad.
They seem gone when I check now. I could swear, that when I installed WSL 2 years ago on my office computer, there was a ridiculous bikini wallpaper problem in the MS store. For some reason they push the store by forcing WSL installs via it ...
I get a feeling whatever deal they had with Amazon over their app store fell through. Nothing else I can think of really makes sense to end support so suddenly.
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.
"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
Looks similar to BlueStacks or MSI App Player, especially since it also requires hardware virtualization, so I assume it's like the Android SDK (that I think used QEMU?). Definitely worth looking at if there are Android apps that you want to run on a Desktop. (I used it for the Ace Attorney games before we got proper ports to modern systems.)
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?
Fun site! A few products were pretty nostalgic, others were... interesting!
>ILoo
>Killed almost 21 years ago, iLoo was a smart portable toilet integrating the complete equipment to surf the Internet from inside and outside the cabinet. It was 13 days old.
The difference for me is that the Killed by Microsoft has products I never used or cared about or I'm happy they killed them (looking at you Visual Sourcesafe) - cool site though - very interesting retrospective.
On the Microsoft campus, there is a building where the courtyard is tiled with commemorative "shipped in ..." plaques for various products. It has long since stopped being updated because there's simply no room for new ones. Walking there can be an interesting experience - very few people would recognize the majority of those product titles.
I use the android version through WSA because it supports chapters which the web version doesn't and it also does a better job of remembering my location when I switch from it to my actual phone than the web app does.
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)
It's not just games – anything multimedia (video, audio, pictures, even my e-book reader) is another likely candidate for including native libraries, and some other apps, too.
Plus Android for x86 has the same problem that it doesn't have officially supported versions of the Google Play APIs which lead to Microsoft relying on the Amazon Store and Amazon's strange fork of Google Play APIs to get any number of apps to run (which was a tiny subset of what Android users consider "Android apps").
X86 Android has a Rosetta like emulator allowing you tu run ARM games on Intel perfectly. WIth GLTools you just emulate a virtual Nvidia Tegra 2/3 GPU per app and that will do the trick.
> I'm aware of qemu/Rosetta/etc but that's not something that Android has ever tried to solve (AFAIK)
Not Google itself (they're seemingly going for a hard transition with their current Pixel phones), but some OEMs (I'm aware of Xiaomi at least) have included such things now that recent ARM CPUs have started dropping 32-bit support.
Yeah I bought a Robo & Kala 2-in-1 because the Arm processor would play great with WSA apps… If this disappears on my system, that’s a lot of functionality gone.
Maybe I should have just held out for a MacBook Air… Lesson learned
> Windows Subsystem for Android™ enables your Windows 11 device to run Android applications that are available in the Amazon Appstore.
This seems so niche it is not a huge surprise they are ending support. Though at the same time, the initial article is from August of last year so it had a very short life.
It was the only feature I considered a net positive added with Win11. Though since Microsoft apparently prefers to not do business with poor peasants like me, using 6 year old CPU's, I decided not to upgrade.
I had high hopes for WSA as an enterprise platform, not as a consumer platform. Give enterprises an easy way to build one custom workflow app for mobile incl. offline support and syncing, then use the same app on your desktop. There is already great tooling for work profiles and mobile device management. Too bad this didn't get enough traction.
The fact they're ending this makes me wonder if the rumors of Amazon fully abandoning AOSP as the basis for FireOS are true. If so, it would be ending it because there won't be an appstore with updated apps before long.
Doesn't make much sense. Building an ecosystem is far, far more difficult than throwing together a small embedded OS. Just ask Samsung and LG (and Google for that matter). Maybe Amazon has enough clout to force all streaming app developers (and game developers, which is the new frontier, and ad platforms) to suck it down and build support for the new platform but I doubt it - plus the ROI is just not there. Why destroy an active well working ecosystem - to accomplish what exactly?!
- Build a credible software stack - from UI kits to audio and video codecs
- Convince the streaming companies to build one more flavor of their apps (in addition to Android/FTV, AppleTV, Roku, and a bunch of SmartTV platforms)
- Build ad stack and also convince major ad platforms to build their respective ad SDKs for the new platform (believe me, even for established platforms this takes years)
And all of this - to accomplish precisely what??? To wean away from Android? Why? There are no licensing issues, Amazon has grown a tremendous expertise in Android, which underlies most of its devices. Why throw all of this away???
Unlike Amazon, Samsung is much more tethered to Google, because they cannot afford to diverge in Android experience for the phones. They tried to cut this Gordian Knot by building Tizen and they learned their lesson the hard way. But at least for them there was a strategic benefit of moving away from Android. There is no such benefit for Amazon.
> - Convince the streaming companies to build one more flavor of their apps (in addition to Android/FTV, AppleTV, Roku, and a bunch of SmartTV platforms)
Amazon already has to convince them to support Fire apps today. The userspace fork (no Google Play APIs at all) has already diverged enough that software developers think of it as a very different platform no matter how many Android dev tools they share. I certainly see that reflected in lots of streaming company's release notes.
How much is Amazon actually benefiting from a shared Android kernel when userspace is so vastly different today?
Given they already have a diverged userspace and fewer tethers to Google doesn't that make more sense for Amazon to experiment with something like Tizen than Samsung does? Amazon has way more ability to lift and shift their unique user experience without disrupting their users for first party apps, and with how limited the Amazon App Store has become, probably fewer complaints about third-party apps, too.
(Tizen is just an example, of course, but can't help but think that an Amazon-Samsung partnership on Tizen even sounds like a fascinating political game versus Google at this point. Seems unlikely to happen, Amazon doesn't seem to want partnerships like that, but an interesting idea in theory.)
They just want to get a grip back on the platform they built. They let the cat out of the bag too long and Fire devices were too much of a loss leader from people pirating and running third party software and services on them that Amazon decided to take their fenced garden and hike it up to a full-on wall.
It's not possible before Amazon can build their own browser that runs on their own OS. (Or, if they can somehow get the Android/Linux version of Chrome run on the OS.) As simple as that.
There needs to be more of a consequence for large companies who create platforms like this, then get a bunch of developers & users dependent on it, and then pull out the rug.
And not necessarily government regulations. Maybe a contract that guarantees operation for X number of years should become the standard, or even better, an explicit agreement to open-source discontinued products so the community can continue running them.
The usual excuse for not open-sourcing is that commercial products aren't developed in a vacuum. Flash, for instance, supposedly included a bunch of codecs that Adobe didn't have the license to redistribute as source.
At a bigger company, there are presumably dependencies on in-house build systems, standard libraries, etc. Maintaining open-source versions of those is unfortunately a non-trivial task.
You just make all the dependencies open source at the time the rest of it becomes open source, then you can keep the updates in-house and the community can update the dependencies if necessary and willing
That still assumes the dependencies are first-party. Some well known CVE examples have been how much both macOS and Windows had internal dependencies on Adobe code. Surely Adobe still has a commercial interest in their code even as/when both macOS and Windows dropped the features that relied on those dependencies?
(For other examples, the game industry is full of well known third-party "middleware" like Bink, SpeedTree, and much more because those middleware like to force their logos into places for advertising as a part of their licensing terms. If Windows had opening or closing credits it might be a surprise how many logos might be forced to show up in it.)
Ideally people (devs) would remember companies like that and avoid them in the future when they decide on which platforms to build their next project or which APIs to trust.
But in reality people (me included) will be annoyed today and forget it tomorrow, when a cool new platform is announced.
I think one thing that really killed it is that the Amazon store is very scarce. I never used it, in part because none of the "good" apps were in the store. I'm surprised Amazon still even has an Android store.
Amazon has their own Android tablets, tvs so they have a vested interest in running their own store.
Unfortunately, shipping Google Apps (GApps) requires meeting certain standards and conditions, which WSA was likely unable to do. Since GApps gatekeep the majority of the average persons Android experience, WSA was doomed for most everyone except the techies that could shoe horn GApps onto WSA.
The real problem is the on going engineering effort required to update and maintain WSA. Google can't even do it for Chrome OS, we're on Android 14 but ChromeOS is still on 11 (at least as of Dec 2023). It's just a different beast than a Linux 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.
IIRC it didn't even ship with the original Windows 11 release and was a year behind or so. Did it ever even get out of beta?
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.
Some of the default shortcuts in the start menu triggered an install wizard for WSA so there was natural ways to discover it (I'm aware of the kindle app, but there must have been a few others). Of course I wouldn't fault anyone for first and foremost deleting all of these as uninvited clutter.
The main issues to me were the hurdle to get the Google Store instead, and the fact that android emulation is no ready yet, full stop.
It was the same issue on Chromebooks so I wouldn't fault microsoft: many android apps gave up on tablet support so they don't expect to be fluidly resized, bluetooth support had no chance in the first place, and a bunch of phone only app were predatory on being uniquely installed (looking at you Line) which made it a non starter to run them elsewhere.
I'm not sure there's any clear solutions to those issues.
The heavy handed tying of WSA to the Amazon appstore is so stupid it almost feels malicious. I've used WSA on multiple computers and every time it's a pain to get it to the point of usability.
Gotta mess with MS store > find WSA > install WSA > get adb working > install f-droid > install aurora appstore.
WSA should have just gone with f-droid or better yet been tied to no appstore by default and just ask for you to provide your own appstore apk on first startup.
This is kind of weird since much of the tech is shared with WSL. It also makes me question the future of WSL, though that would be insane to deprecate given it has worked miracles for rehabilitating Microsoft‘s image and Windows’ usability.
At this point, Linux is so integral to Microsoft's strategy that if anything, it's more likely that Microsoft would abandon the Windows kernel and rebuild the Windows UI on top of Linux.
(To be clear, that's not going to happen, but it's also no longer at the "hell would freeze over" level of absurdity for Nadella's Microsoft.)
WSL is what makes Windows viable in ML/AI at all. They've made a correct (in hindsight it was genius, actually) decision to expose GPUs in WSL using Windows drivers and a shim in a vm. It works surprisingly well.
That’s why I’m surprised. It’s literally just maintaining a virtual machine image and some emulation, very little upkeep from Windows core. But it does seem like there was an Amazon component to this story.
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.
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.
Are you not using an x86 emulator or something? Forget to install or enable your CPU virtualization extensions?
Because the emulator ain't sluggish, and if it is you'd get that same sluggishness with WSA since it's largely the same underlying tech. It's still using a virtual machine and emulation, it's not like a simulator.
i am using an x86 emulator - booting it up takes about twice as long though compared to WSA. Also being able to dynamically resize the Window as need was nice to test different sizes directly within WSA instead of having multiple emulators running
Everything? It's a Hyper-V virtual machine hence how it can run Android's Linux kernel & HALs. It's not doing ARM emulation as well, but it's still an emulator at heart.
Android on the desktop works very well on Wayland with Waydroid and it even supports Google Play store. https://waydro.id/
Great running apps not available on Linux with a touchscreen PC. It only seems to run Android apps compiled for x86, but it is very fast.
There are practical use cases, and it is very usable. I haven’t tried it on WSL2, but it seems like a practical approach without reliance on Microsoft.
The idea made more sense when Windows Phone was something they were still pursuing. In an alternate timeline, maybe it would have been easy to run Android apps on Windows Phone. Of course, you'd still wonder why not just use an Android phone. And I'm sure it would have been botched by many caveats.
I sideloaded Marvel Unlimited so I could read comics on my surface. It was genuinely a great experience, because its the biggest tablet I own and the android app was far better then the web app. Rip WSA.
It was a useful way to run kindle on a surface tablet (as the windows version of the kindle app is not touchscreen friendly). Other than that, I didn’t find many use cases.
I work a lot with Android, but didn't really have much reason to use it when I can just run an emulator. It's sad to see Microsoft killing it so early.
Ah, the only feature that made me even remotely interested in Windows 11... dead. Welp, I can tell my friends that Windows 11 is a complete shitshow now, thanks Microsoft.
> enables your Windows 11 device to run Android applications that are available in the Amazon Appstore
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'm using it from time to time. A lot of consumer equipment nowadays can only be operated with Android and iOS apps. For all those things I need WSA the Apps are off course not available in the official Amazon App Store, so i had to manually download them from f-droid and side load them with ADB.
I can see why WSA is not such an often used subsystem.
Edit: It was not f-droid, they don't provide APKs for copyright protected apps. It was shady mirroring websites that re-upload APKs from the Google Play Store. (downloading and installing from those sites is legal where I live).
I wanted to use it for android app pen testing. I wasn't even able to install a rootable version of Android, so it was useless to me. Performance was also pretty terrible.
Prob just a way to hire good Android devs away from Google or something. Can't believe anyone senior at MS ever really thought this was anything but a technical/PR exercise
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?