Microsoft Ending Support For Windows Subsystem For Android

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Microsoft Ending Support For Windows Subsystem For Android

Microsoft announced today they will be winding down their support for Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA), which is similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) but was designed to run Android apps from the Amazon Appstore atop Windows 11...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Dropping-WSA

[Quackdoc]

RIP WSA you were never any good despite having great bones. Your apps performed like crap, and you made it hard as balls to sideload stuff, and amazon store is just bad. It's zero surprise you died.

[juxuanu]

Meanwhile Waydroid is splendid.

[peterdk]

Huh, already? I was expecting them to continue this for a few years. Well, that saves some time testing and optimizing my apps.
Documentation for screen resizing for example was very lacking. I never got it to work as I wanted on Windows.

[alexvoda]

Really disappointed to see it abandoned. It is perfect for running AntennaPod and NewPipe and a few other Android only apps and I'll continue using it for that until it is gone.

[justinkb]

Getting the distinct feeling this is getting axed because not enough people were using it to justify continuing support. But they never tried to get people to use it, keeping it in restricted beta or preview since forever basically. Never made it easy to install

[edxposed]

The woes with the graphics stack may have been one of the reasons they decided to drop WSA. Since WSA release there have been issues with dGPU VRAM not being reclaimed, and GLES3 and Vulkan availability is pretty much nil. ISVs usually don't package x86/x64 native libraries in their APKs, and the Windows Arm device graphics drivers are extremely poor to the point that they can't get hardware acceleration in WSA. This means users only have two choices: stuttering due to low CPU performance caused by libhoudini translations, or stuttering UI due to low graphics performance. Either way it's impossible to get good UI/UX. Microsoft itself can't fix these problems.

[ezst036]

Now we know what happens when EEE fails.

[carguello2]

I think this makes sense. It was reported late last year that Amazon was preparing to move its Fire Tablets away from Android,

Amazon Fire Tablets and other gear will reportedly switch away from Android

Amazon could ditch Android for some OS you probably haven't heard of

If this ends up being true Microsoft would have to build its Android Store and replace (I mean provide different APIs that applications can leverage) all current APIs used by Google that provide features like location, maps, search, etc, see microG Project.

Also, without a Store, the user would have to use third-party frontends to download and sideload APks, not the most friendly approach.

There are also the likes of BlueStacks and Google Play Games on PC, so not all hope is lost. Great project, sad to see it go away though.

[peterdk]

Also, without a Store, the user would have to use third-party frontends to download and sideload APks, not the most friendly approach.

Why don't they strike a deal with Google and add Google Play? Isn't that a win for Google as well?