Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA)
learn.microsoft.com
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Not sure if this means anything other than "phone apps run best on, well, a phone", especially since I can't think of anything from my phone that I would truly like on my desktop, other than instant messages, which are already available in various ways?
The SMS and Calls.
Seriously, at this point, my phone is the least useful device I own for managing both of these functions. The only utility in having them in some broken down hard to use form is for the slight convenience of being able to use them outside of my home if I wanted to. I rarely want to. I'd much prefer these functions to be on my PC.
It'd also mean I could just ignore my phone much more effectively and just pick up on everything at my desk when i get home.
https://messages.google.com/web/
I used it for several years and found it quite reliable, unlike Apple's way of handling SMS/iMessage on each Apple device separately.
This is probably just a matter of other people not drinking enough coffee, however.
Works even better as a "install to home screen" app on my Mac.
It has all the usual issues of this kind of mirroring software: (1) once in a while it falls out of sync. (2) the messaging UI is really spartan (and for some reason doesn't support OS-level spell check?) (3) MMS support is either spotty or missing (4) notifications occasionally just stop happening.
I'm still grateful for it and use it everyday, but GConnect is #1 on my list of "once I get some time to do OSS stuff again".
If my life circumstances were a bit different, I could happily live without a phone and minutes+data plan. As it is, my wife would not approve...
My primary number has been a Google Voice number for a decade, and when I do use my actual phone for SMS/MMS and calls, I'm using the Voice app on there too.
NOTE: Google Voice only works for personal Google Accounts in the US and Google Workspace accounts in select markets. Text messaging is not supported in all markets.I would like to have my phone only be used for calls and SMS and nothing else. All the messenger apps, email, browsing is better off on my desktop.
Typing on phone and doing anything that involves multiple apps is much more work compared to using a desktop.
SMS is mostly SPAM, so definitely off. I would never pick up a call originating from my carrier.
For your scenario:
Do the same for all notifications, and only check phone when you want to, when home?
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/i-ac...
I noticed recently that Microsoft relented and soon starts introducing CoPilot features into old outlook (or 'real' or 'full' outlook as people are calling it at work). Previously it was coupled to 'new' outlook only to promote adoption. But it really sees a lot of pushback from users. I hope this will continue into not canning the real outlook at all.
Microsoft are always pushing 'more change management' as a 'solution' but some changes are simply not good and it's normal for users to resist. If anything they push too much (like turning on features by default, and sending reminders that you have not used feature xyz enough last week through Viva Insights)
And the skullduggery they're doing with the consumer windows mail migration (pulling the user's email into their cloud without making this very clear) is totally out of line IMO.
Personally I don't even hate the web version so much. I use it daily because Microsoft never made a native outlook for my platform anyway. But I'm not a heavy user of mail and I do see its limitations.
google feels the same way. things that work need to be rebuilt and rereleased to justify headcount.
the mail -> new outlook is just another in the long tradition of microsoft pushing a new native gui framework, only to abandon it in house. How can they ever expect developers developers developers to commit to another future abandonware.
https://irrlicht3d.org/index.php?t=1626
they really should be going in reverse and making all their apps pure native and then getting them to also render as html.
Here's the thing though: Microsoft is rather heavy-handed about pushing "New Outlook" and "New Teams". New Outlook is mostly just a wrapped webapp - so slightly cleaner than the old one, but otherwise much slower and less functional. Now, guess which Outlook has had support for Copilot for the past couple months? :).
Right now it's mostly an annoyance - I have to switch back and forth couple times a day, depending on whether I need "snooze e-mail" or S/MIME at any given moment. But the latter is really a dealbreaker. Strange for a product sold to corporations, which makes me think that MS is planning to get people off e-mails entirely.
They bogged it down with too many features and now they're trying to scrape it up by having a slightly more optimised framework, which is basically still exactly the same, it's now just based on edge instead of chrome which we all know are really the same thing under the hood anyway.
So where new teams is just a cutesy little badge on the same thing, new outlook is really a serious deprecation.
And yeah they're trying to get people off email for sure. Microsoft even have banners of "don't mail but teams" under their consultants' emails.
Makes sense from a strategic perspective to move from an open platform to something they fully control and own. It's the old lock-in game they've always played, after their initial strategy of Embracing Extend failed on email (they made a huge attempt but Google was very successful so the same and now there's a kinda duopoly stalemate they can never win)
They still broke some things. Instead of custom contact lists in Chat, you're supposed supposed to use the People app, and until just right now, that one didn't (!) show the presence status of each contact. It seems that very very recently they've finally fixed that, although it's still less compact and at-a-glance than the old contact list.
And "Notify when available" is annoyingly missing in New Teams, too.
I'm of course talking of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.
On the other side: Old Outlook grew to be an organic mess of COM components, duct tape, and glitter. Some of those COM components that people think of as "native functionality" was second-party and third-party components written by a weird grab bag of companies, including some that no longer exist. Expecting full feature parity from Outlook sounds to me like an impossible task, especially because how can Microsoft know all those third-party components? It almost seems like a case where a new brand might have been better, but it's also hard to blame Microsoft with realizing that they have a lot to lose if they kill the Outlook brand.
(I'm willing to bet S/MIME was based on fragile old IE code. I'm somewhat happy in New Outlook now, but I find I keep having to switch to Old Outlook for silly "required" corporate Add-Ins that use old APIs and haven't upgraded yet/give the impression that they might not upgrade ever.)
Even though I don't want Microsoft to decide what's important and not in my inbox. I get so little I can easily do that myself because I block any and all unsolicited sales attempt forever - which Microsoft is trying to make harder because those people are their customer too! For while the 'new outlook' didn't even have the block sender option. Only the less severe report spam. But I want to block them (and ideally their entire company) forever.
This strategy works great for me and I often gloat over my trash folder with the many sales emails there "I know you're busy, you probably forgot to respond to my 20 previous emails but I proposed you another meeting, does tomorrow 2:00 suit? Here's the invite!". I love seeing them waste their time. Most of them seem actually manual even (despite most not even seeming to have bothered reading what I actually do)
I really hate Microsoft's approach to change management. They're only advocating what's best for them, not for the users. There's no win-win here, it's all them and they don't even attempt to hide it except under a really thin sleazy sales veneer.
I thought they were done developing the old outlook since they started hacking it instead of doing things properly. For example, in the rounded corner update for the old outlook, they started drawing black squares over message pane during resizing, probably to hide visual defects.
Glad to know there is a chance that they might keep the old outlook around.
Even the "round all the corners" changes seemed mostly "free" from component library upgrades from changes in other Office and Windows apps and components shared with "New Outlook" (on the one side: people keep assuming New Outlook is a bloated web app, especially because it has a lot of UI consistency with Outlook.com now, but there's a lot of evidence it is more complicated that just a web app; on the other side: a lot of those painting problems especially during resizing relate to Old Outlook has been partly "a web app" for a long time; hybrids apps are hybrid).
Still using the Outlook application installed on Windows. Recently purchased Office 2021 (for $40, they had a sale) which came with the Outlook application. It does get updates every now and then so I know they're still supporting it. I've been using the Outlook application for a few decades, no plan to stop, and I will never use their online version.
Never change Microsoft
The new Electron monster is horrible and looks like a toy.
The very latest and greatest version of Outlook, has broken Search. Not in a subtle way, no, as in the "remove focus from the goddamn text box after you've typed a couple of characters" kind of broken.
I've had to remove and re-add accounts to fix Outlook issues more than all other email client issues combined. This is especially prevalent with the mobile versions.
Do you know how many times I've had to reset the view after Outlook, for no reason discernible, decided to change it, delete it or simply corrupt the file. I stopped counting after I had to start using scientific notation.
We'll continue to disagree on the App versions of Outlook.
The web version is ok.. I will agree with you on that point.
The first one was Project Astoria, whose ashes gave birth to WSL.
The current thing (WSL2) is "just" a VM (with lots of work to make it work nicer)…
It's really funny, NT was supposed to be great at three things:
- be easily ported to different hardware architectures, which then never actually became relevant (and nowadays macOS is the best example for actual architecture migrations!)
- have a much more sophisticated and elaborate security model than those filthy unices (and now we're getting sudo on Windows, because 30 years later, it's still too complicated for anyone to use as intended)
- allow fluid switching between different userlands, be it win32, OS/2 (RIP), Unix (RIP), and anything else you could want in the future! (except no, you're getting VMs now)
Thus it is easier and cheaper to plug a Linux VM, than implement POSIX, and then get the same kind of complaints from Linux folks using macOS, or other UNIX proper environments.
Who cares, everyone either misplaces ACL's or ran everything as Administrator or close.
Under Linux/Unix, we had ACL's too, but nobody used them unless you were in a networked environment.
Commercially relevant, perhaps, but it has remained technically relevant: The NT Kernel has historically operated on lots of different hardware architectures and continues to run on a small variety today. The ARM port is still active and a living branch even if total hardware sales are fewer than projected and Microsoft ceded most of that hardware space commercially when they gave up on Phones.
> - have a much more sophisticated and elaborate security model than those filthy unices (and now we're getting sudo on Windows, because 30 years later, it's still too complicated for anyone to use as intended)
That "sudo for windows" still leverages the elaborate Windows ACL model. It's not like they are also porting Linux kernel security on top of Windows. They just realized that both "RunAs.exe" and PowerShell's "Start-Process" have more complicated CLIs than necessary for simple UAC cases and decided to copy the CLI arguments of a well known CLI.
> - allow fluid switching between different userlands, be it win32, OS/2 (RIP), Unix (RIP), and anything else you could want in the future! (except no, you're getting VMs now)
Turns out users don't actually want to switch userlands on the fly and when they do VMs feel more right as an abstraction?
More (RIP) than OS/2 or the various attempts at POSIX userlands, Windows 8 actually tried to deliver a truly modern userland as a wholesale new experience, failed spectacularly. Switching was fluid and felt good if you enjoyed the new userland (which had some extraordinary, noticeable benefits in bootup and power/battery usage and other things). Coordination between the two userlands got really good in 8.1. The final lessons that seemed to come from Windows 8 was to never try that again because users hated it and didn't understand it. (I still lament how much of "didn't understand it" was so much more of a failure of education and PR and marketing and incidentals more than technical problems. There was some great technical appeal of a chance to move from win32 to a userland that was greener [both as in pastures and ecologically].)
Microsoft itself made a mess out of the developer experience.
Now I am back to distributed computing, and for anything Windows the classical frameworks are good enough.
Eh, they did 2 migrations while supporting at most 2 architectures concurrently. Nothing compared to Linux which is maintained for x86, POWER, ARM, s390x, MIPS etc concurrently
As others have pointed out macOS allowed migration including existing binaries. They have done 3 of these migrations. 68k to PowerPC, PowerPC to x86, and x86 to ARM. Each time, users were allowed to bring along existing binaries and keep using them and each time the binaries from the previous system generally ran as fast or faster on the new system. As far as I am aware, Linux has never done anything like this.
A large part of why the binaries ran well on macOS migrations is that each time the migration came with a substantial processor speed increase. This meant that emulated/translated binaries were able to roughly match their previous performance, while native binaries for the new architecture were significantly faster. On Linux, however, the most common reason for cross-architecture tech these days is running x86 binaries on something like a Raspberry Pi, which means a slower processor on top of the translation layer - so non-native apps see a huge drop in performance.
After I figured that out I basically dropped all the run Android on a desktop things.
Wyze doesn't support viewing their cameras on PC without a bunch of fiddling. I downloaded the app and was running within 20 minutes of having the idea. The usability isn't the best, but having it on my desktop is has been a real time saver with a new puppy.
Some apps don't have a good Windows equivalent.
This feature still exists and it works. It's partly developed by Samsung, so that's why it works.
Sometimes I go to this coworking space. They have an iOS/Android app you need to use to book a desk, message the admins, unlock the front door, pay, etc. No web app. Forces me to get my phone out when I’d rather just stay on my laptop. If I could run their app on my laptop (haven’t looked into it yet), I’d like that
I have to keep a Chromebook to be able to run Android apps on the desktop, unless anyone has another solution?
It was also an alternative way for Android developers to write and test code on Windows. You could edit/deploy faster to WSA than to an Android emulator. And WSA apps are resizable, which is handy for seeing how well your code could handle different Android layouts.
The drawback was that WSA did not have any Google Play services. So no map, no Android push notifications, etc. That could have been addressed if Google wanted to license all of the Play bits.
Windows is famously crappy on touchscreens. It would be really nice to have something like ChromeOS or Android be the UI for a gaming handheld.
Still exists and still using it but this is not the same as that is just showing the phone's screen and content on your desktop.
To deploy this way, developers create a packaged version of their Android app for GPG.
One thing that immediately comes to mind are streaming apps. Most providers don't offer windows apps and the websites don't allow downloads, which is very annoying for laptops/windows tablets.
I assumed there was a subset of users out there that needed something like this but I thought it was a complete waste of time.
But yes, it doesn't seem like a huge use case.
I believe, without any proof, that this is why they had to redo their rings and what they meant shortly after.
Then there is everything else people have mentioned, with them being completely reliant on Amazon's store but requiring "something" where most of the apps that are on Amazon's mobile store weren't available.
Without Play Store it's not viable/interesting. Also, it's so. much. work. keeping up with Android releases, even inside Google. Wear and ChromeOS are always a version or two behind, and vast majority of the time, it is two versions.
If Google internally wasn't helpful enough to each other, I can't imagine they played nice with Microsoft on this.
The broad business war means there's no incentive for VPs to drive it.
Technical challenges via CTS* mean there's no incentive for 1-3 steps up the org chart to enable it.
The narrow-er business challenge of not having the Play Store is the final nail for any cooperation. I don't think Google is interested in proactively collaborating unless you do CTS.
* Android's CTS, compatibility test suite, has to be passed to get the Play Store, and broadly, it is organized around individual device launches, rather than a subsystem than can run on any hardware.
(n.b. I worked on Wear then Android at Google, 6 years total)
Just install a version of WSA that has the Play Store. Take Magisk along the way too because why not.
MS also is clearly bribing/paying for big apps to come to its Windows platform via the Windows store, so why bother with this Android middle-man that is all trouble? Eventually the big apps got to Windows Store and that's really all that matters to 90% of customers.
Everything about this project was doomed from the start. I think MS just has given up on apps and mobile and leaves that to Apple or Samsung, who are now just caretakers for ios and android at this point and mobile becoming a low/no profit commodity in the long run, outside of payment processing.
wsl --install -d <Distribution Name>With WSA, you could take any old APK file you pick up off the road and install it on your desktop.
With GPG, they decide what you can and cannot play.
What's the best alternative? Bluestacks seems very shady. Chrome OS Flex in a VM? (Scratch that. It looks like Chrome OS Flex doesn't allow Android apps)
P.S. Do we make "jokes" about Microsoft killing things off like we do with Google?
Waydroid runs Android apps on Linux and some people claim to have gotten it to work on WSL.
- Waydroid: https://waydro.id
Reddit threads:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/eofn...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/waydroid/comments/10y813d/is_it_pos...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/waydroid/comments/14e6t3g/does_maki...
Well someone went ahead and made https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
>ILoo
>Killed almost 21 years ago, iLoo was a smart portable toilet integrating the complete equipment to surf the Internet from inside and outside the cabinet. It was 13 days old.
Doesn't Dalvik/ART compile Java Bytecode down to a native layer anyway, so this wouldn't matter?
Not Google itself (they're seemingly going for a hard transition with their current Pixel phones), but some OEMs (I'm aware of Xiaomi at least) have included such things now that recent ARM CPUs have started dropping 32-bit support.
Maybe I should have just held out for a MacBook Air… Lesson learned
This seems so niche it is not a huge surprise they are ending support. Though at the same time, the initial article is from August of last year so it had a very short life.
I can understand them, my LG with WebOS is good enough for similar purposes.
Again, to accomplish this goal, one has to:
- Build a credible software stack - from UI kits to audio and video codecs
- Convince the streaming companies to build one more flavor of their apps (in addition to Android/FTV, AppleTV, Roku, and a bunch of SmartTV platforms)
- Build ad stack and also convince major ad platforms to build their respective ad SDKs for the new platform (believe me, even for established platforms this takes years)
And all of this - to accomplish precisely what??? To wean away from Android? Why? There are no licensing issues, Amazon has grown a tremendous expertise in Android, which underlies most of its devices. Why throw all of this away???
Unlike Amazon, Samsung is much more tethered to Google, because they cannot afford to diverge in Android experience for the phones. They tried to cut this Gordian Knot by building Tizen and they learned their lesson the hard way. But at least for them there was a strategic benefit of moving away from Android. There is no such benefit for Amazon.
Amazon already has to convince them to support Fire apps today. The userspace fork (no Google Play APIs at all) has already diverged enough that software developers think of it as a very different platform no matter how many Android dev tools they share. I certainly see that reflected in lots of streaming company's release notes.
How much is Amazon actually benefiting from a shared Android kernel when userspace is so vastly different today?
Given they already have a diverged userspace and fewer tethers to Google doesn't that make more sense for Amazon to experiment with something like Tizen than Samsung does? Amazon has way more ability to lift and shift their unique user experience without disrupting their users for first party apps, and with how limited the Amazon App Store has become, probably fewer complaints about third-party apps, too.
(Tizen is just an example, of course, but can't help but think that an Amazon-Samsung partnership on Tizen even sounds like a fascinating political game versus Google at this point. Seems unlikely to happen, Amazon doesn't seem to want partnerships like that, but an interesting idea in theory.)
Who says they care about apps from third parties?
Amazon Prime already has its UI.
And not necessarily government regulations. Maybe a contract that guarantees operation for X number of years should become the standard, or even better, an explicit agreement to open-source discontinued products so the community can continue running them.
At a bigger company, there are presumably dependencies on in-house build systems, standard libraries, etc. Maintaining open-source versions of those is unfortunately a non-trivial task.
(For other examples, the game industry is full of well known third-party "middleware" like Bink, SpeedTree, and much more because those middleware like to force their logos into places for advertising as a part of their licensing terms. If Windows had opening or closing credits it might be a surprise how many logos might be forced to show up in it.)
But in reality people (me included) will be annoyed today and forget it tomorrow, when a cool new platform is announced.
Unfortunately, shipping Google Apps (GApps) requires meeting certain standards and conditions, which WSA was likely unable to do. Since GApps gatekeep the majority of the average persons Android experience, WSA was doomed for most everyone except the techies that could shoe horn GApps onto WSA.
The real problem is the on going engineering effort required to update and maintain WSA. Google can't even do it for Chrome OS, we're on Android 14 but ChromeOS is still on 11 (at least as of Dec 2023). It's just a different beast than a Linux subsystem.
They should just open source this and let the community maintain it.
They also did a horrible job of advertising it. This is the first I've heard about it from Microsoft since the feature first rolled out in Windows 11 2.5 years ago.
This was the only feature of Windows 11 that was remotely interesting to me. I guess I don't have to worry about missing out on anything avoiding 11 now.
The main issues to me were the hurdle to get the Google Store instead, and the fact that android emulation is no ready yet, full stop.
It was the same issue on Chromebooks so I wouldn't fault microsoft: many android apps gave up on tablet support so they don't expect to be fluidly resized, bluetooth support had no chance in the first place, and a bunch of phone only app were predatory on being uniquely installed (looking at you Line) which made it a non starter to run them elsewhere.
I'm not sure there's any clear solutions to those issues.
Gotta mess with MS store > find WSA > install WSA > get adb working > install f-droid > install aurora appstore.
WSA should have just gone with f-droid or better yet been tied to no appstore by default and just ask for you to provide your own appstore apk on first startup.
(To be clear, that's not going to happen, but it's also no longer at the "hell would freeze over" level of absurdity for Nadella's Microsoft.)
Because the emulator ain't sluggish, and if it is you'd get that same sluggishness with WSA since it's largely the same underlying tech. It's still using a virtual machine and emulation, it's not like a simulator.
Great running apps not available on Linux with a touchscreen PC. It only seems to run Android apps compiled for x86, but it is very fast.
There are practical use cases, and it is very usable. I haven’t tried it on WSL2, but it seems like a practical approach without reliance on Microsoft.
You can run ARM apps as well using libhoudini. Checkout: https://github.com/casualsnek/waydroid_script
> I haven’t tried it on WSL2, but it seems like a practical approach without reliance on Microsoft
Waydroid won't work on WSL2 as the kernel provided by MS doesn't have binder driver.
I really liked it, but I found the native version of Kindle ran better because there wasn't the "startup" hit.
WSA, not so sure. Who is using it? They very likely have telemetry and thus usage.
This might be the crux of it. Google probably will never port the Play store to Windows, MS doesn't want to maintain their own Android app store, and Amazon is a competitor with a pretty uncompelling app store to boot.
I can see why WSA is not such an often used subsystem.
Android app developers on Windows is a disappointed group on Twitter at least
I'm not surprised they abandoned it.