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Windows Subsystem for Android
- synergy20 5y agoMicrosoft's OS runs Google's Apps on Amazon's app store. Screw up Apple.
- neogodless 5y agoSo you can watch Netflix on a Google Android application from Amazon's app store on Microsoft's operating system? And you can run Facebook Messenger/Instagram/etc. on Android apps..
- synergy20 5y agoBetter than your only option is: Apps from Appstore on Apple's OS with Apple's hardware that all named iLockYouUp. It gets boring. :)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jrm4 5y agoI don't care if MS is a huge company, I cannot take this seriously with the ridiculous doublespeak. The last thing was a Linux Subsystem for Windows, and this is an Android Subsystem for Windows.
- belltaco 5y agoIt's more like Windows' Subsystem for Android.
- pxeger1 5y agoI think I remember hearing that they originally wanted to call it LSW instead, but couldn't put "Linux" first because it's trademarked.
- rndmio 5y agoI always read it as; Windows (Subsystem for Linux) not (Windows Subsystem) for Linux
- chipsa 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX Similar name. And much older. Just imagine there's a '-' after the Windows.
- dcminter 5y agoAt least it's short. Speaking as someone who used to be an "IBM VisualAge for C++ for OS/2" user. (s/developer/user/ edit for clarity) I don't really think it's doublespeak as such, just the weird corporate perspective. They built a subsystem that supports Linux so "Windows subsystem for Linux" makes logical sense at least. I think with that (twisted) perspective "Linux for Windows" would imply a version of Linux that was for running Windows applications. I wholeheartedly agree that "Linux for Windows" would be a better name for WSL, but I can see their point of view if I squint enough. Also, at least this new subsystem is consistently named; if you know what WSL is it's obvious what this is.
- MikusR 5y agoIt's a Windows subsystem for running Android. What doublespeak?
- dr-detroit 5y ago
- Jernik 5y agoThis is a Windows subsystem. It is a system that runs inside of Windows, so it is a Windows subsystem. What is this subsytem for? It is for running Android (or previously Linux) applications and software. I agree that it is confusing, but I think it is incorrect to say that the name is outright wrong.
- AnotherGoodName 5y agoTo be fair to op I did expect this to be a link to something that allowed Windows to run on Android as well. In software 'for X' commonly refers to what it runs on. 'Doom for Windows' would run on Windows. A Windows subsystem for Android immediately implies a Windows subsystem that runs on Android. It's a very common usage and language is formed by the common usage. Microsoft have this backwards.
- jodrellblank 5y agoIt also commonly refers to what it does. 'Doom for blind people' would not run on blind people. 'Doom for trackballs' would not run on trackballs, it would let you use trackballs with Doom. > "It's a very common usage and language is formed by the common usage. Microsoft have this backwards." Product names aren't formed by common usage, they're defined by the company which creates them.
- AnotherGoodName 5y ago>'Doom for trackballs' would not run on trackballs, I wouldn't put that past Doom porters :D
- DoctorOW 5y agoInteresting that it's the Amazon App Store. I assume they couldn't get Google Play and picked the second largest Android store?
- marinhero 5y agoYou can still sideload the Google Play Store and install apps from there. It just requires a couple of extra steps.
- jccalhoun 5y agogoogle has announced their own version for games. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-brings-android-games-to-windows-in-limited-very-limited-beta/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-brings-androi...
- Someone1234 5y agoMaybe Microsoft wants to keep Windows their advertising sandbox therefore working with the largest advertising company in the world wasn't seen as wise. Whereas Amazon's whole thing is just about ecosystem building/device tie-ins, so there's less conflict of interests (Microsoft after all doesn't make many of the devices or services Amazon does).
- chipsa 5y agoGoogle Play has specific restrictions on what it can be bundled with (it can be sideloaded latter without issue right now).
- dpark 5y agoI can’t imagine that Google was willing to play ball on this. Google has aggressively leveraged their control of their properties to block Microsoft in the past (e.g. YouTube on Windows Phone). I expect that Microsoft reached out to Google about Android support on Windows and Google promptly said that they aren’t going to give up a Chrome OS advantage. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft. But I have no insider information on this.
- DoctorOW 5y ago
- ethanpil 5y agoTwo interesting notes that I found here: 1) This also utilizes a VM for the Android system, like the Linux one. 2) "Unlike traditional mobile form factors, Android apps running on Windows 11 can be freely resized, should be responsive in their resizing, and can be snapped using Windows actions/gestures."
- tehbeard 5y agoSo unusable if I want to run my own VM's in virtual box/vagrant etc? Last time I messed around with it when vbox said they'd fixed it to use hyper-v, I wasted 6 hours to end up back with wsl1 and working VM's instead of wsl2 and nothing else.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoI was under the impression that Google had already worked out resizable windows in Android to allow for more flexible form factors and the Android layer on ChromeOS, so that might have been mostly a freebie.
- thesuperbigfrog 5y agoFirst it was Windows Subsystem for Linux. Now Windows Subsystem for Android has been added too. It is the OS/2-ization of Windows as more subsystems are added to try to make Windows a clearinghouse for any possible desktop use. What could come next? Windows Subsystem for Xbox - so anything that plays on Xbox will play on Windows
- mugsie 5y agoI mean, that wouldn't be hardest thing in the world to do, afaik, XBox OS is a windows kernel ...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- basementcat 5y agoOne of the first subsystems for Windows NT was the OS/2 subsystem. Some versions even supported Presentation Manager (GUI applications). https://second.wiki/wiki/2-subsystem https://second.wiki/wiki/2-subsystem
- karmakaze 5y agoNever used that one. Makes sense though since NT grew out of research on OS/2 v3. The Posix subsystem[0] didn't work so well the times I tried working with it. The OS/2 subsystem didn't matter so much as Windows NT popularity outgrew that of OS/2 pretty quickly. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
- mycall 5y agoIf they open sourced the POSIX subsystem, it might have had a chance to keep growing.
- sedatk 5y agoAnother original subsystem was POSIX subsystem which provided a UNIX-like layer on Windows.
- laurent123456 5y agoDoes it also make Android development easier on Windows? i.e. can I build an Android app and open it via the subsystem, without having to run an emulator?
- jaywalk 5y agoYes: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/#test-and-debug https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/#test-a...
- epage 5y agoThough this won't be as smooth, this is reminding me of the Maemo days. I had made adaptive abstractions for GTK / Maemo's patches and would develop my applications using PyGTK on the desktop. When I was ready for a release, I'd just scp the source over, do spot checking, and release my packages. That set the bar high enough for developer experience that I've never gotten into Android dev since Maemo died.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoWould it be any smoother? The official dev emulator runs Android in a VM, and this runs Android in a VM. So the points of differentiation are speed (does the SDK VM use hardware acceleration?) and integration (I'm guessing WSA doesn't play nice with attaching a debugger, and the SDK VM, AFAIK, just gives you a single "screen" in a window). So... maybe?
- easton 5y agoDoes this mean WSL will be enabled by default on Windows, or at least that you can enable it without admin rights? That would be handy for draconian corporate environments.
- jaywalk 5y agoNo. What would lead you to think that's a possibility?
- jayd16 5y agoSeems a bit odd to tie a developer only feature to a consumer app store. Makes it feel like WS* will move towards a streamlined consumer facing feature.
- jaywalk 5y agoI don't think it's a developer-only feature. My point was more that WSA and WSL are separate and even if WSA becomes a default feature, that doesn't mean WSL will.
- easton 5y agoBecause WSA (I believe) is implemented as a WSL distro, so you'd need the feature installed for it to work.
- ourmandave 5y agoI assume they tested with industry standards, which is to say it will run Doom.
- 323 5y agoAndroid industry standard is TikTok, and yes, it runs that.
- monocasa 5y agoI seem to remember hearing a rumor that WSL was originally intended to be a WSA, but that failed internally for some reason so they cleaned it up just enough to run console applications and shipped it as WSL1?
- my123 5y ago> that failed internally Was available in public beta on Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview.
- noisem4ker 5y agoYes. More than a rumor. Look up Project Astoria.
- monocasa 5y agoThe rumor was that WSL1 was the leftover codebase from Astoria, not that Astoria existed.
- noisem4ker 5y agoRight. I was conflating Project Astoria and Drawbridge.
- halotrope 5y agoI was wondering with WSL already: why is it not called “Android Subsystem for Windows” but the other way around. Is there a historical reason for it to be called that way?
- throwaway946513 5y agoWindows first, because Microsoft wants their OS to not give any lime-light to Linux or alternative OS's.
- endtime 5y agoIf they felt that way, they probably wouldn't be building the thing in the first place.
- mariusmg 5y agoI think they are just following the naming convention started (a long time ago) with "Windows Services for UNIX".
- AndrewDucker 5y agoIt is "[The] Windows Subsystem for [running] Android"
- meibo 5y agoWindows NT is historically made up of several subsystems that use this naming scheme, so they decided to go with it again.
- lzybkr 5y agoIt's about trademarks - see https://twitter.com/richturn_ms/status/1245742145119510529 https://twitter.com/richturn_ms/status/1245742145119510529
- ksec 5y agoOH Thank You. Now I feel much better. Still dislike the name but my brain is much easier on me knowing there is a valid reason behind it.
- nikolay 5y agoI tried it in a VM with 4GB RAM and it does not work as it needs more memory.
- k8sToGo 5y agoIf you do that it seems you have to do nested virtualization
- nikolay 5y agoThen it's not really like WSL, which is not using a VM. But, well, of course, as Android is mostly not on Intel.
- fgonzag 5y agoWSL2 is virtualized and no longer a traditional windows subsystem (and it never really was traditional from what I gather, compared to the OS/2 and Win32 subsystems)
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoNext is iOS?
- anonymousDan 5y agoHow well does the ARM emulation on x86 work performance wise I wonder?
- colejohnson66 5y agoAssuming it's just x86 Android (which does exist), it would just be using the Dalvik VM. So no ARM->x86 transpiling; just a JITter
- floatboth 5y agoLots of apps aren't pure JVM apps, and many apps with native components don't ship x86_64 versions of native libraries.
- toast0 5y agoThere were a decent handful of x86_64 Android phones released, so it's not that uncommon. Decent apps ship a couple flavors of arm, mips, and x86. Of course, not all app developers care that much.
- withinrafael 5y agoIf you're looking for a quick way to determine if your favorite app will run well in WSA, check out this table I created (and the community contributes to). https://github.com/riverar/wsa-app-compatibility https://github.com/riverar/wsa-app-compatibility
- TowerTall 5y agoBumpy road ahead it looks like. Do you have any statistic on how many apps are broken, works etc. Any insights into the types of errors? Are they mostly in the same class or is it all kinds of different types of errors?
- withinrafael 5y agoThink most of the issues come down to either lack of Google Services or lack of GPU acceleration (which I believe is possible, just not well documented). Will investigate the latter.
- sexy_panda 5y agoThese titles are so confusing. I thought it could run windows applications on Android.
- vikramkr 5y agoI think they're just following the naming scheme from WSL
- saghm 5y agoA new name following a confusing scheme is still confusing
- sexy_panda 5y agoI know WSL, but I was still confused. Maybe I'm just tired.
- rsynnott 5y agoThis confusing naming goes back over 20 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
- naikrovek 5y agoit's not confusing, though.
- SahAssar 5y agoI guess they think of it as "[a] windows subsystem for [running] android". Or put in a different way "android running on a windows subsystem".
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoI suspect this is due to trademark laws. I've often seen policies that say "you can write 'yourthing for Trademarked Thing' but not 'Trademarked Thing yourthing'", e.g. when it comes to inofficial clients for a platform. I think they simply applied the same principle here.
- drewg123 5y agoIn order to be available on a Windows 11 device...only a small set of apps selected by Microsoft and Amazon are available. WHY? Maybe give me a warning when installing, but at least let me try. I hate how Apple gave devs the choice to make their apps unavailable on MacOS, so even though I can run theoretically run iOS apps on my M1 MBP, there are no apps I care about available for MacOS, so the feature might as well not exist. At least with Android you can sideload the APK, so that's a plus..
- Anunayj 5y agoyou can sideload on WSA too! Though turns out a lot of stuff doesn't work if Google Play services is missing, so you might also wanna patch the system image to include OpenGApps.
- netizen-936824 5y agoI wonder if you can side load the Aurora Store or F-Droid
- vitorgrs 5y agoYes, you can.
- 908B64B197 5y agoYesterday I commented here [0] that having a phone running NT (because it maintains a strong ABI compatibility) with an Android Userland (for app compatibility) would solve the 3 years support window most android phones have (because of patched kernels the devs won’t care to update and recompile to the latest version). I wonder how well this subsystem could run on existing phone hardware. There are, after all, Nokia phones that are running NT kernels (the last windows phone on the market). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30079874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30079874
- daemin 5y agoStill doesn't tempt me to "upgrade" to Windows 11.
- naikrovek 5y agoyou can always spot the "people" who have "problems" with normal "things" because they always "quote" random words in order to bring the "legitimacy" of the "words" into "question." we all find it quite "annoying".
- daemin 5y agoYes, I am bringing the legitimacy of the word "upgrade" into question when changing the operating system from Windows 10 to Windows 11. For me it's a significant decrease in usability and the feature of being able to run some selected Android applications from a single selected marketplace doesn't make me want to install the newer operating system at all. It's a rational choice to quote the word upgrade because it doesn't mean that to me.
- RachelF 5y agoThere's always https://www.android-x86.org/ https://www.android-x86.org/ You can run a full-featured Android on any VM on a PC or Mac.
- zamadatix 5y agoThe integrations here are far better than what you'll achieve trying to make your own VM. If you're just looking for Play Store / Google Play Services there are already ways to load those that are much less work. On Linux there is Anbox as well which can be native ARM64 or x86 without virt (run as a container). Not sure of alternatives on macOS but I wouldn't be surprised if there was something better than a raw Android VM there as well.