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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

They didn't already have a Windows ARM build? I know that ecosystem is immature but jeez, barely having Chrome on board >4 years after launching it is a dire state of affairs.

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It’s obvious that Google intentionally withholds their software from platforms that could compete with their Android and ChromeOS devices (which are of course ARM-based).

They did the same to Windows Phone back in the day. Not having apps like YouTube left the platform at a clear disadvantage because they can’t be credibly replaced by third party clients (YouTube doesn’t tolerate them and will try to break them).

Is Microsoft also intentionally withholding software from Windows ARM? They only just shipped a fully native Visual Studio for ARM in December, four years after releasing the ARM-based Surface Pro X, and a decade after their earlier ARM push with the Tegra-based Surfaces.

Visual Studio had to wait for .NET Framework (not .NET Core) to be ported to ARM64 native.

Quite a part of Microsoft wanted to avoid doing that outright, so it took quite a while to happen.

I see https://imgur.com/XLuaF0h is as relevant as ever.

Google has supported ARM Chromebooks for years; if MS was shipping software for Darwin on Apple silicon or Linux on ARM then yeah that would be a weird look

Microsoft does ship ARM64 software for macOS and Linux though. E.g. .net core, PowerShell, and VS Code come to mind. Some of the Office suite ships ARM64 on macOS only as well (Teams, Word, Excel, Outlook, etc) and, back to the topic of browsers, Edge too of course.

Did every other developer also withhold apps from Windows Phone intentionally to prevent competition with their operating systems?

Besides Google and Snapchat most other platforms had apps (of varying levels of quality, though)

Yep, enjoyed getting banned from Snapchat for using a third party client on Windows Phone.

Snapchat would not allow a port no matter how much money Microsoft offered them.

How many people are there on windows arm? It doesn't seem super popular.

If anything, this looks like Google thinking that that might be changing.

Does anyone know if there are new windows arm products that might make it more popular?

I'm a very technical user, but my personal travel device is the Robo & Kala Surface alternative (bought for around $650 with detachable keyboard). Runs on ARM and handles emulation surprisingly well. What's super nice is that ARM Android apps runs seamlessly via Subsystem for Android, making travel easy since I can use the Android app for whatever service I want (Disney, Netflix, etc) and sync/download content in advance. I remote into more capable devices if I need additional horsepower, but it really is completely usable already.

It's not really happening yet but there's a renewed push to make it happen, with MS partnering with Qualcomm on a high performance mobile SOC that's meant to compete with Apples M-series SOCs, but it remains to be seen if OEMs will bite or just keep using the tried and true x86 parts. This isn't the first time MS has tried to make Windows ARM a thing.

I assume Microsoft will release a Surface or two with the new soc. Lenovo probably too since they released with the older qualcomm mobile SoCs. It all boils down to the actual real world performance of the new Soc, battery life etc.

Personally most software I run today would run fine on arm or it's web based so if the reviews look good I'm probably buying one.

> How many people are there on windows arm? It doesn't seem super popular.

> If anything, this looks like Google thinking that that might be changing.

I don't think you can necessarily interpret one of those to be the cause of the other; if anything, Chrome being supported might be a _necessary_ for the platform to get popular in the first place.

Yes, but it currently self-identifies as “32-bit emulated.”

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