Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   neowin[.]net/news/kb5010414-and-kb5010415-updates-for-windows-11-and-10-out-taskbar-changes-and-more/

   Install the latest update, KB5010414, make sure your store apps are up to date -- open the store, click Library on the lower left, click Get Updates -- then if it's not on the store's front page banner, search the Win11 store for Amazon App Store. Installing the Amazon App Store will install both the Windows Subsystem for Android [WSA] and the Amazon app. You can also trigger this if you try to install one of Amazon's Android apps from Win11's store, though it's a bit hard to tell which apps are from Amazon's store that way. Unfortunately the selection of Android apps that Amazon offers is limited, and that selection is further limited when it comes to Amazon's Win11 store. I couldn't find a master list of what apps/games were offered, and I couldn't find a complete listing in the Win11 store -- it looks like the only way to see the complete collection is using the Windows Amazon Store app itself.

   You can make a limited number of settings to WSA:

   support.microsoft[.]com/en-us/windows/manage-settings-for-mobile-apps-on-windows-000f97e8-8c20-490e-9ef4-cd90d903f847

   You can sideload Android apps, but they will not be able to use any of the Play Store features, and not every app will work.

   windowscentral[.]com/windows-11-android-apk-sideload-tool-about-get-even-better

   The requirements to install & run the Amazon App Store are: 8 GB of RAM, a solid-state drive (SSD), and a supported processor (Intel® Core™ i3 8th Generation, AMD Ryzen™ 3000, Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 8c, or above). It's unclear [yet] whether a PC/laptop running Win11 that doesn't meet all of Win11's hardware requirements can run the store, though if not, a hack may become available later on. CPU virtualization support has to be turned on in the BIOS, and a subset of Windows Hyper-V [Virtual Machine Platform] has to be enabled / installed -- it should also work if you have the full Hyper-V setup, or more full featured Hyper-V options enabled. Note: the full set of Hyper-V options is not available in the Home version of Windows. Note 2: While it's possible to run VirtualBox with the Virtual Machine Platform enabled, performance issues are IMHO severe enough that you should not consider it.

   That all said, Google is developing the software to run Android apps in Win10 & 11 -- they're beta testing in Asia.

   Posted 2 years ago #
2. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   zdnet[.]com/article/android-on-windows-11-is-it-worth-the-effort/

   Ed Bott's take on ZDNet:

   Is it all worth it?

   The Windows Subsystem for Android was designed for use on touch-enabled tablets, not on PCs driven by a keyboard and mouse. The Kindle app running on a Surface device with a detachable keyboard is one where that design succeeds. You can arguably take a single device on the road and use it for reading, entertainment, and running productivity apps in that configuration.

   But that's just about the only success story in this early iteration of Android on Windows. The selection in Amazon's Appstore is paltry, and it's hard to imagine that any developers with A-list Android apps are going to be swayed to upload them to Amazon's store so that they can run on a tiny minority of Windows devices.

   This scenario might have been more sustainable in a world where Windows ran on smaller tablets, but Microsoft pretty much killed off that form factor after the Windows 8 debacle.

   So, for now, the Windows Subsystem on Android is mostly just a proof of concept. Microsoft couldn't crack the code for convincing developers to write native apps for its Windows tablets, and it's difficult to see anything here that makes a more persuasive argument.

   As always, the correct answer is probably to just wait for version 3.

   Posted 2 years ago #

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