Windows Subsystem for Android: What's the point? Microsoft has previewed the Subsystem for Android on Windows 11, and The Register took it for a spin. Android apps for Windows 11 was made available by Microsoft earlier this month via its Windows Insider programme, seemingly making it as hard as possible for users to get it working. The official route is a matter of first …
I'm forced to use Android emulation because a smart home device I regularly use only has a mobile app. The latest Bluestacks beta works reasonably well; though it's not always 100% stable, it provides most of the things listed in this article: desktop icons for apps, the ability to run them in separate resizable windows, and, unlike Microsoft's offering, also the Google Play appstore. So I'm left wondering, how does WSA measure up to that?
I'm hoping it's (eventually) going to be better – I'm also a smartphone refusenik, but BlueStacks, as you say, is not entirely stable; it's also a resource hog (which matters on my 8GB laptop). It also forces you to look at adverts for games with terribly misleading images of busty wenches.
Thanks to the death (assassination?) of 3G, there are stacks of old phones and tablets at the local second hand shop that can be had for ~$10 each. WiFi and Bluetooth still work, so I can play with my gadgets.
I'm pecking on an old Samsung tablet right now.
You could install Install F-droid on any android phone and only install open source android apps. And then never need to setup a google account. Most people choose to setup and use a google account, which is on par with Microsoft and Apple when it comes to harvesting metadata, because it is the default and they trust Alphabet Inc. (which in some ways is shocking, it always reminds me of my favourite quote 'Mark Zuckerberg: They "trust me". Dumb f*cks.').
Honestly, I sometimes wonder whether that's actually the point? MS see Android and iOS as eating their lunch, so why not get out of the OS game sooner rather than later? Honestly, some of the things they're doing with Windows 11, just trying to think "why" they're doing it makes my brain hurt.
Paris Hilton because she looks as confused as I feel.
<blockquote>BlackBerry OS 10, which came with an Android emulator. The result was that hardly any developer came up with a native BBOS version of their apps</blockquote>
I don't buy that one. The Blackberry installed base had become minuscule *before* BB10 was released. Then BB10 comes out and breaks backwards compatibility. I don't think the Android emulation had anything to do with the sudden-death of the platform.
> Microsoft must have its reasons, but it appears that many of these restrictions are artificial and can be bypassed
As a software developer: We choose a minimum spec, and test our software on that spec. It may run on lower-spec PCs, at least most of the time. But then, after months of use, the user might find some part of the software that their PC is not powerful enough to run. They will then complain that our software is faulty. Err, no, the problem is that your PC doesn't meet the specs. "But it works, everything else runs". Err, no, if it worked you wouldn't be calling me.
And we may be conservative in our choice of minimum spec. If lowering the RAM requirement from 8GB to 4GB is only going to allow a few more people to run the software, but will cost us time testing and time optimizing code in future, then someone will make a business decision whether it is worth the cost of doing that for the small amount of extra revenue.
Also note that, over time, as the proportion of 4GB PCs drops, the extra revenue will drop but the cost of squeezing our code into a 4GB system remains, as we can't drop support for the existing users with 4GB RAM. Much better to spec 8GB minimum right from the start, so our code has room to grow as we add more features.
I suspect part of it is simply what devices come with these days, especially business users, rather than someone at home on an ultra budget laptop.
A 4GB laptop upgrade is around £20, 8GB around £30. So I suspect the rationale is why spend time and effort optimising code, when doubling the RAM in a typical laptop/PC is so cheap. (Assuming it's not so budget, not to have a memory slot of course).
Even the US company I work for, who are known to penny pinch, have an entry level laptop, the default everyone gets unless you are a confirmed power user, that has 16GB RAM, and a 6 core, 12 thread Ryzen CPU. And that's the min spec option.
> that has 16GB RAM, and a 6 core, 12 thread Ryzen CPU. And that's the min spec option.
That seems about right for W10 running Office, Teams and Zoom concurrently and users not complaining about audio-visual quality (although why vendors aren't fitting 1080 HD webcams as standard now...).
Although my min. spec. includes HD screen and the option to add a second 16GB module.
Dell were selling these for £660 +VAT earlier this year, which placed them among poorer spec'ed Intel systems, making the purchasing decision a no brainer.
"when did we start thinking about 4GB not being enough"
Assuming an entire "modern" system has 4GB, then It's not just software frameworks like the obese Electron or browser tabs that have pushed it. It's also things like screen resolution, refresh rates, polling speeds... a very large list that I'm not at all educated on. However, if things are bigger and faster, you need bigger and faster caches. For Windows specifically, Windows has always seemed to want to copy things in their entirety before writing (I'm not sure on the technicalities of CURRENT WIndow's zero-copy features/policies, but they seemed non-existent at one point).
Windows 95 was supposed to "run great" in 4MB. That's Mega Bytes. I recall that, contemporaneously. we advised a minimum of 12MB to run our software, which was more than most people had in those days. And, of course, Windows 3.x maxed out at 16MB in Standard Mode.
-A.
>when did we start thinking about 4GB not being enough memory to run apps?
When we switched from 32-bit to 64-bit OS's.
But even before that if you regularly used more than one application at a time, XP became a bit of a dog due to the page swapping (might not have been so noticeable with DDR4 and SSD).
I know some people who have to use multiple devices such as a 2 phones and a tablet because they want to do be logged into a particular app under multiple accounts simultaneously to separate there work from personal accounts, so being able to do that from one PC would be an advantage if Windows Subsystem for Android supports running multiple instances of an app.
"... meeting requirements for processor, memory and storage type (SSD only)"
So Nanny is now dictating what drive technology we're allowed to use?
To quote Monty Python "this sketch is getting too silly".
If it matters that much, why don't they just lease us the ruddy hardware with the OS?
For those who missed it, getting Google Play Store running on Win11 has been hitting up news sites recently. It's on my list of things to play with this weekend, being I'm in the UK and it doesn't appear to require any of the limitations (US, Beta, etc) that the official package suffers from...
https://github.com/ADeltaX/WSAGAScript
has long been to dominate Mobile the way IE once dominated the fixed Interweb thingy. But an interminable string of disastrous projects, even the one-time acqusition of Nokia, failed to dent the bloatware that is Windows and crush it into a mobile-sized device with room to spare for real apps. It is at last getting better, but how do you gain traction in a world of apps dominated by paywall-masters Apple and licensing-masters Google? Why you do what Google were forced to do with their own Chrome OS, and build an Android compatibility layer. Now, everybody will leap on our newest offerings with tears of joy, and the fools clinging to their Android devices will be left eating out dust, bwahahahahaaa!
Or maybe the leopard has changed its spots, we'll see.
Wasn't there an IBM and Apple OS which was designed to run OS personalities? If you ran Mac OS native you could run Windows and IBM OS/2 personalities seamlessly. Likewise if running OS/2 as the host the Mac and Windows personalities could be run. I think the actual OS personalities were hidden and what you were supposed to get is seamless windowing of apps.
All on PowerPC hardware at the time. CHRP comes to mind.
But Microsoft is not interested in that. They must have Windows dominating the corporate office and back office even if it requires them to provide ways to run and monitor other virtualized OS's. They will have their marketing department figure some special little thing they'll add to their version of the virtualization and tell them customers this is why they should run MS-Linux or MS-Android, etc on their Windows subsytem for X, Y, Z.
Wasn't there an IBM and Apple OS which was designed to run OS personalities?
I hate my memory sometimes. As soon as I read that, it immediately piped up with “Ah yes, Taligent”. Random trivia about the early 90s tech landscape: gotcha. Birthdays of close friends and family: nope, all blank, nada, sorry…
Windows 11 ?
Another of Microsoft's wet dreams continues into the wakefull world of 2021, 8Gb, SSD only, IPV6 trix for the security pricks and it will still struggle to put a decent moving image on the screen, 'cos the icons have rounded corners..............
What a sham, a scam, in fact it's like fat in the pan, I do not like it man ..............
No wonder the world is in a jam, we are using a frying pan for preserving the fruits of our labour, when a working printer/scanner was all I ever wanted .............
ALF
I'm the developer of a little known open source Android web browser named Fulguris and I would love to get WSA for Windows 10 so that I could use it on desktop. To me that's the only interresting feature on Windows 11, everything else looks more like regressions. Which brings me to my next point. In the context of global warming it's ambarassing to see a megacorp like MS applying arbitrary hardware limitations to Windows 11 and withholding such features from Windows 10. Those cheap tricks to get people to upgrade and consume more material resources ought to be banned.
MS please, bring WSA to Windows 10.
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