Make Windows 11 as cool as your phone with Android apps

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PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston After many, many requests, Microsoft finally added the capability to run Android apps when it released Windows 11.
[See the full post at: Make Windows 11 as cool as your phone with Android apps]

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WSGeo, fisher75, ibe98765, abbodi86, lmacri, rc primak, oldfry

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At least for myself, I don’t see much use in running a phone app of any kind on a Windows PC or any computer. In the end these apps were developed for small touch screens not laptops or desktops. I guess if your testing apps developed for Android, it might be useful, but wouldn’t you want to test on devices that would be actually using those apps.

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wavy, Jay B., ibe98765, Alex5723, rc primak

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John wrote:

At least for myself, I don’t see much use in running a phone app of any kind on a Windows PC or any computer. In the end these apps were developed for small touch screens not laptops or desktops.

I’ve been running Android apps on my Linux desktop for a few years now, especially some mobile-only games. For the most part, you are correct, of course… an app designed for  a small touchscreen is not going to be ideal on a larger-screened device that has a hardware keyboard and a discrete (not touchscreen) pointing device.

Sometimes, though, it is still the best choice, because so much of the world has decided that phones are THE consumer computing platform, and they no longer offer any PC versions of their apps.

Microsoft used to have a lovely consumer-oriented series of mapping programs called Streets & Trips. There were competitors, such as Delorme Street Atlas, but I found that Streets & Trips was simply better. I purchased it several times (each year’s version was sold as a new product).

Then MS decided that “desktop” PCs (a confusing term, as it also includes laptops that are not all-in-one or touch enabled) were just so yesterday that they discontinued S&T, back in 2013. Delorme discontinued theirs at about the same time.

Now there are no credible consumer mapping programs for the PC platform. I have found one enterprise-oriented program, but it is priced accordingly, which puts it out of my reach.

I’ve been using the trial version of S&T 2013 (Windows only) in a VM… I can’t buy it because MS considers it a dead product and will not accept the purchase, even as their own MS servers still host the trial version (or at least they did last I checked a few years ago). It’s now ten years out of date, and that will just keep getting worse.

There are web sites that offer some of the functionality that S&T has, but the “killer” feature of S&T is, to me, having the entire map database available offline. That will not work with a web site!

The Android platform, though, has lots of map programs that will work on my emulator. Sadly, my choice for actual phones, Here Wego, appears to be ARM-only, and the Android emulator emulates Android for x86-64. Fortunately, there are many others.

The same is true for weather radar apps. Right now, the only free source of specialized weather radar data (the ability to look at various slice angles, storm-relative velocity, dual-pol (correlation coefficient) on the PC (natively), as far as I know, is the NWS web site. It has had some performance problems in the past, and it would be nice to have a second “source” (NWS is the ultimate source, but not necessarily at the hosting level). Offline operation is not a factor, of course, as the radar data has to come from somewhere.

I have only really scratched the surface with these. I have OSMAnd and a few weather radar apps installed in my emulator, but I have not used them much yet.

I guess if your testing apps developed for Android, it might be useful, but wouldn’t you want to test on devices that would be actually using those apps?

Developing is far more easily done on a PC than a phone, and that requires large amounts of executing code, seeing what it does, then back to the development environment for debugging and more writing of code.

Once the project is ostensibly finished, an emulator can permit testing on all kinds of different devices with various screen size and feature combinations. Ideally you would want to do the final stage of testing on actual phones, but there are so many of them out there that in reality only a very tiny percentage can ever be tested.

If a customer of a given app finds and reports a bug, but the developer has a very different phone than the person with the bug, there is a good chance the bug will not manifest in the same way for the developer. To fix it, he has to be able to see it, and an emulator allows him to repeat the bug-triggering conditions as closely as possible without having to go buy more phones. It may not show up there either, but at least it is one more chance that it may be found.

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Bluestacks 5 (free from http://www.bluestacks.com) emulates an Android smartphone on Windows 10 or 11 and can run most Play Store apps.

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You can use something like Airdroid to pump your phone screen to the big monitor and keyboard.

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When it comes to app sources, on my emulator and degoogled phone, I use Aurora Store. It’s available from F-Droid.

F-Droid is usually my initial go-to when I want a new app, as it is all open source stuff that is verified free of trackers and malware to the best of the ability of the maintainers (and I believe they build all apps from source themselves, so you are assured the app you get is actually the one in the source repo). Unfortunately, most of the things I want are not on F-Droid, so the next step is Aurora.

Aurora is a third party client for accessing Google Play. You can do this without signing in or even having a Google account, which is how I use it.

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Is it a foregone conclusion that Win10 will never have Android app support?

I don’t have a position, and don’t know what’s entailed, if that’s a major amount of work. Just wondering. Thank you.

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Will Fastie

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WSGeo wrote:

Is it a foregone conclusion that Win10 will never have Android app support?

My short answer is yes. See Microsoft’s webpage Windows Subsystem for Android™️. I feel certain this is a “feature” for Windows 11 and later and that it will not be retrofitted into Windows 10. After all, Windows 11 needs all the “interesting” features it can get.

 

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WSGeo

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