Microsoft drags Windows Subsystem for Android into the trash Next year Microsoft will kill off the Windows Subsystem for Android, its framework for running Android applications from the Amazon Appstore on Windows 11 devices. "Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA)," the IT titan said in a notice added to its WSA documentation site. "As a result, the …
It is possible to install Google Play on it. The only issue I had was, if you use a Google Workspace account, you have to go into admin settings to allow users to disable authentication requirement when waking up their phone, because that doesn’t work in WSA, and isn’t needed because you are already authenticated to the Windows desktop.
"As part of our commitment to meeting evolving customer needs, we periodically commit to ceasing to meet some needs we committed to meet a while ago. Customers who still need needs that we commit to ceasing to meet might commit to evolving to cease to use our product to meet their needs. Or they could fuck off and die, for all we care. We're in it for the money."
It's too bad, because what was there worked pretty well for a little while. Though of course you had to sideload to get anything useful, since Amazon's android store sucks.
But then... it just stopped working. And it never updated. I think that was at least six months ago?
Really? A good reason for Windows 11? You owe me a new keyboard!
Running 'apps' designed for full screen attention on the desktop is the last thing I want. That's hardly going to tempt me away from Win2k never mind the silky luxury that is modern KDE.
And not sending my data to all and sundry either!
I've not really used WSA. but my motherboard came with a free version of Bluestacks android emulator..
I did muck around with this for a while, but I found that the few games I wanted (I'm not really a mobile gamer) were generally already available on Windows. I tried a few apps, but, TBH, I found these painful to use. Mobile apps should stay on touch screen devices..
Haven't really kept up with things, but given how many legacy platforms cam be emulated, maybe it's time for a usable smartphone emulator?
(If there are already "good" versions of such, please downvote me, but leave links, so I can catch up. Thanks.)
There are a bunch of apps I wouldn't mind being able to run on (or, more accurately, from) a Windows platform, but emulating things like Bluetooth might be a pain.
In other words, I don't want to make cell phone calls from an emulator, I just want to run some apps.
> Maybe try Waydroid?
The OP mentioned running it on Windows. So far as I'm aware Waydroid requires Wayland. Which is why I couldn't use it on Linux Mint until the most recent upgrade, and even now it's "experimental", i.e. nearly unusable. Seems to work OK on my UBPorts phone, though.
You can run Android-x86 inside VirtualBox tolerably well. Not the latest Android, though.
-A.
So annoyed they are doing this. I'm using it with full play support and I thought it would be great to have Bluetooth support added. But I think that would have to be officially added before it can be hacked.
It seems a no brainer to have Android phone apps on Windows desktop but it's probably eating into the app market in some way.
Anything really useful is always taken away it seems.
Windows is now deprecated, you all have one year to switch to Linux.
I mean official Android app support is such an awesome, no-brainer feature nowadays. How they could even consider dropping it beyond me. If costs are out of control, reduce the size of the team and review the roadmap instead of just cancelling everything.
Why? That's not a gotcha question, I'm serious. What exactly does having Android app support bring to the table that you can't already get, usually better, from a Windows app? Mobile apps are usually rather limited because the devs are anticipating 1) it'll be used on a platform with limited multi-tasking functionality, and 2) the amount of resources they can expect is small.
I mean... Do I want to use the Android version of Firefox or the Windows version? While I admit the limits of my imagination don't represent every possibility, I can't envision a single scenario that has any real utility to more than a small subset of users.
My idea, which I admittedly didn't actually do, was apps for controlling Bluetooth devices. I have seen several devices that intend to connect to a phone app for updates and configuration, but I don't always want to run them from that. When WSA came out, I downloaded it to see if I could link with a device like that, which didn't appear to be supported at the time, and then I didn't try again. From some posts here, it sounds like that still isn't supported, but I do not know that from experience.
I did not go through the Amazon store to install things. I sideloaded FDroid with ADB, then installed apps from that, including Aurora for accessing things from the Play Store. I did not install Play Services, but theoretically you can with some effort. Most applications I tried worked correctly, but I already have a phone, so there were few that I was very interested in trying. One that I did use was a mapping application I've already used on my phone, which allows me to view map data using a familiar interface and with access to the same data as the app I would later use when traveling.
Maybe this is related to Amazon dropping Android on their Fire devices for a much more locked down "Vega".
Microsoft hitched their wagon to the Amazon Android Store, which will be going away sooner rather than later. And they're not about to go to Google and have the Play Store on Win11. If they were smart, they'd switch to F-Droid.
As a matter of fact, I don't see that el reg has reported on that story. But we have no shortage of NextPlatform articles about a 3% speed-bump of whatever data center product.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-is-dropping-android-for-vega-smart-device-operating-system
Unlikely. There's maybe one confirmed device with the Vega OS, and odds are it'll be limited to their Echo line. Their tablets and STBs will likely continue running their forked version of AOSP for quite some time. Things like the coverage of Vega are why I long ago stopped reading a lot of the more mainstream tech press. They have a tendency to leap to wild conclusions in a rush to publish and never really take the time to think things through.
Like, let's just say the plan is to migrate their STBs to this new OS. At the very least they'd need to make sure the major streaming platforms all had apps ready to go when the cutover happened, otherwise you'd have a lot of very unhappy customers. Then, what about the revenue Amazon gets from their Android app store? It's probably not a lot, but it's not zero. Creating a new OS for embedded systems like the Echo line makes a lot of sense compared to trying to twist and contort Android to work. Especially when they're already taking on the effort of maintaining their own AOSP fork, then they're likely creating forks of that fork for each generation. Having a single OS, built from the ground up to be used with its embedded platforms like Echo would likely simplify things a lot. There's also no expectation by customers to be able to load additional apps on their Echo devices. It comes with what it comes with, and that's it. So, they just need to make sure things like Netflix and Spotify are working, and then they're done. No need to worry about all the wailing and gnashing of teeth because random obscure app three extremely vocal people in the world use doesn't work.
This sounds like the latest in worsening interoperability between Goog and other big tech co platforms.
I've not seen any publicity about these two issues, but from what I've seen, Windows has been making a concerted effort to block the use of Chrome browser on Windows 11 by stopping the Chrome app even opening. Here the motive would be revenge for Chromebook taking OS market share off Windows laptops (UK was at 8% in 2020, but now must be closer to 20% and rising).
Secondly, it appears Samsung is also now causing severe glitches in how Chrome displays pages through the One UI making them unreadable - if this is a covert strategy then Samsung have the perfect motive in that Pixel has been threatening Samsung's mobile phone market share in recent years.
Any others experiencing major new interoperability issues?
I once had a friend whip up an app to make Chrome effectively unusable on the Mac.
I couldn't get users to stop installing it. They'd run it from their home directory when I locked them out of the Applications folder. And they'd whine.
So this little toy would let them install it, let them launch it, and after a random bit of time anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes later, crash it and trash their profile. They could relaunch, but their history and bookmarks would be gone, and soon after it would crash again.
They'd whine a bit, I'd say "Chrome is unsupported, use Firefox", they'd whine a bit more, then they'd give up.
Microsoft does this over and over. They announce a product which is supposed to be really cool, and looks really cool, and lots of people get excited about it. Then they release it to a tiny set of countries, so that most of the world cannot access it. Then they shut it down because of low adoption. The list of regions that WSA was available in is ridiculous. It's full of countries or regions which most people have never heard of, or have populations measured in the thousands. It's great that the pope can install WSA in the Vatican City, but people have been clamouring to get access to it and MS just ignores those requests.
They did the same thing with Cortana - they spent years hyping how awesome it was and implementing stupid things like making it speak Klingon, yet expanding availability to more than a handful of countries only happened after years, at which time they lost the entire momentum of hype that was created when it was first launched.
I'll never understand the logic that goes on in MS, where they build products and intentionally prevent people from using it, then can them for a lack of interest or adoption. Maybe if they spent less energy on rebranding products every 6 months they'd be able to put more energy into building products that people can use.
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