Wine On Android Is Making Progress, Running Solitaire

Last year was the last time we had a chance to talk about Wine on Android for running Windows programs on Google's mobile operating system. While it's not quite mainline yet, Wine on Android has been making much progress and can now run Windows' Solitaire game on your Android device.

Wine leader Alexandre Julliard provided a status update at FOSDEM last weekend for Wine on Google Android. The Wine on Android project is still focused upon supporting Windows binaries on Android for both Intel x86 and ARM devices.

Julliard shared that they now have working support for Android's Bionic C library, cross-compilation is supported for Wine on Android with both i686 and ARM architectures, and there's a basic graphics driver using the desktop mode.

Among the challenges that Wine on Android has yielded comes down to dealing with Android's Java focus inside Wine, the Android process architecture, missing libraries not readily available, lack of keyboard and mouse, high DPI displays, OpenGL ES only, and packaging restrictions.

While basic Windows applications are running on Android with Wine, the developers are still working on finishing the user driver, Direct3D and OpenGL application support, audio support, and handling of application launchers and MIME types. All of this Wine Android code also still has to be integrated into mainline.

Wine developers are also experimenting with QEMU support for being able to run the x86 binaries on ARM. This is a feature that has yet to be fully realized, but can be sufficient for running the well known Windows Solitaire program on ARM.

Those wishing to learn more can find the FOSDEM 2014 Wine Android slides at WineHQ.org.