CodeWeavers Will Soon Release CrossOver/Wine For Android, DirectX11 Support Progressing

Since early 2014 we've seen Wine running on Android and now it looks like before the end of the year CodeWeavers will release a version of CrossOver for Android along with publishing the associated Wine patches.

Jeremy White of CodeWeavers shared an update on the company at last month's WineConf 2015 in Vienna. CodeWeavers continues to be the main organization sponsoring Wine development. Jeremy shared that during the presentation that most of their CrossOver customers are in fact Mac OS X users, even though CrossOver is also available for Linux systems. However, he says the overall CrossOver business is in a bit of a decline.

Fortunately, CodeWeavers is doing well at helping companies port their applications to Linux and OS X and this "OEM business" is growing for them. It's also helping out their position as a contract-able company for porting since NVIDIA recently bought out TransGaming's porting business.

2013: Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps

What most Phoronix readers are interested in though is the release of Wine/CrossOver for Android, since it's been talked about a lot over the years but really hasn't been available. Likely before the end of the year, White mentioned that CodeWeavers will release a free tech preview of CrossOver for Android. Before getting too excited over the idea of running Windows apps on your ARM Android smartphone or tablet, this will be limited to Android x86. Due to the lack of ARM Windows binaries and not utilizing QEMU or other processes for running x86 code on ARMv7/ARMv8, only the limited selection of Intel Android hardware will support this version of CrossOver.

Besides the architectural limitations, the experience might not be great either considering most Android devices don't have a physical keyboard or mouse, so your mileage may vary based upon what Windows software you want to run and how touch-friendly it happens to be. Given these factors, CodeWeavers is still trying to figure out how to monetize CrossOver for Android.

Jeremy White said the port is nearly done and should be released in the next few months. Once released, CodeWeavers will post the upstream Wine patches for Android support.

He also commented that they still have people working on Direct3D/DirectX 11 support in Wine. While we've seen recent Wine 1.7 development releases implement various D3D11 functions, it still is likely to be some months before the Direct3D 11 support is working for modern Windows games with Wine. It's been since earlier this year that CodeWeavers has been focusing on Direct3D 11 Wine support.

You can see White's CodeWeavers 2015 company status update via the 15 minute video embedded below.