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Oh wow, Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA)!
The Amazon Appstore on Windows and all apps and games dependent on WSA won't be supported starting March 5, 2025.
Any apps or games you installed prior to today will still be available through the deprecation date.
Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/
Surprised they’re pulling the plug on this. I didn’t particularly find it useful as an end user but it was a developer tool for the most part. I occasionally sideloaded some games to fool around with but I could never get most of the features to work for proprietary food apps, like GPS and such. It would have been really nice to be able to order McDonalds and whatever from my computer instead of needing to do it from the phone.
Hopefully the subsystem will still function more or less and we can keep sideloading even after deprecation.
WSA never received much traction from the beginning. The main reason I can think behind this might be the fact that android is always changing and it is hard to maintain. In linux we get LTS releases but with android there is no such thing.
was it really that useful as a developer tool? the Android team provides emulators that run on all platforms (pretty sure they use qemu). it would be nice to eliminate the VM overhead if this is run via some container (still would need to run x86 which may or may not be an issue), but my gut says the people using just the emulator to test don’t care to go out of their way to configure something else, or ya know just have a test device.
my impression was that they wanted to target this as a consumer platform for running apps on the desktop
Why would you be surprised? This is just an ordinary “company pulls the plug on proprietary thing that they think isn’t worth it”. If you want to rely on a something, do not use something where some entity can pull the plug for everyone arbitrarily. There’s no gain for Microsoft from people using this, neither for playing games nor for developers. It’s not like they run an Android app store where they can get revenue or anything. At most this is a marketing blip for drawing people to Windows where they can molest them with ads, but this feature is not in any tech news anymore, so why put anymore work in it?
Surprised they’re pulling the plug on this. I didn’t particularly find it useful as an end user but it was a developer tool for the most part. I occasionally sideloaded some games to fool around with but I could never get most of the features to work for proprietary food apps, like GPS and such. It would have been really nice to be able to order McDonalds and whatever from my computer instead of needing to do it from the phone.
Hopefully the subsystem will still function more or less and we can keep sideloading even after deprecation.
WSA never received much traction from the beginning. The main reason I can think behind this might be the fact that android is always changing and it is hard to maintain. In linux we get LTS releases but with android there is no such thing.
I would guess that it has more to do with the Amazon App Store. The catalog is not very big and just a fraction of what the Play Store is.
was it really that useful as a developer tool? the Android team provides emulators that run on all platforms (pretty sure they use
qemu). it would be nice to eliminate the VM overhead if this is run via some container (still would need to run x86 which may or may not be an issue), but my gut says the people using just the emulator to test don’t care to go out of their way to configure something else, or ya know just have a test device.my impression was that they wanted to target this as a consumer platform for running apps on the desktop
Why would you be surprised? This is just an ordinary “company pulls the plug on proprietary thing that they think isn’t worth it”. If you want to rely on a something, do not use something where some entity can pull the plug for everyone arbitrarily. There’s no gain for Microsoft from people using this, neither for playing games nor for developers. It’s not like they run an Android app store where they can get revenue or anything. At most this is a marketing blip for drawing people to Windows where they can molest them with ads, but this feature is not in any tech news anymore, so why put anymore work in it?