Android apps running on Windows 11

Key Takeaways

microsoft has just released a preview version of android apps running on windows 11. now obviously this didn't make the full release um earlier this month but if you are a beta channel user of windows 11 you'll need to opt into the windows insider program you can now get access to these android apps so you can see i have a couple or a few actually pinned to my start menu here i'm going to show you how this all works how you actually get it and just how well these sort of apps run side by side with other windows apps so first things first the first thing you need to do is obviously sign up to be a beta insider if you're not quite sure about that you need to check out the microsoft blogs they have all the details on how you sign up to that and what you do is you'll find all this stuff in the actual microsoft store so you'll search for an android app in here and then it will basically redirect you over towards the amazon app store to get those android apps and what it installs in the background is something called the windows subsystem for android now this is very similar to the linux subsystem for windows which allows obviously you to run linux distros and linux apps on top of windows what this actual subsystem for android does is it allows you obviously to run android apps on windows 11. now this is the basic settings interface for this you get the android files picker and this will start that up and it as you can see it's basically starting a virtual machine essentially which will run android apps on on windows 11 here and so the most basic thing is there's a files picker you get sort of access to the images and audio and any documents you might download within these android apps when you're running them that's a pretty sort of basic android feature there everything else you can have this running continuously in the background or you can have it spin up as needed so if you don't want it to use a bunch of memory and resources in the background you might want as needed ticked here other stuff is like developer mode pretty basic settings um for here what's really the star of the show is actually the amazon app store that comes with this as well so this is actually how you're going to load on apps into windows 11 and how you're going to run them side-by-side with other wraps as you can see this is basically the same as what you would get on a fire device um so an amazon fire device unfortunately at the moment during this preview period there's only around about 50 apps so it's pretty limited to what you can actually install so whereas minecraft might be available typically on the firestore if you try and search for it you're not actually going to find it right now um but there are a bunch of other games um i've installed stuff like uh the kindle app so i'll spin that up now you can see you get the basic sort of basic kindle app that you have on android either way you can also get access to your library i don't actually have any books on this account to really show you exactly how that sort of works um but imagine the kindle app on android that's pretty much what you're getting here what's really i think interesting about this integration though is the gaming side of things obviously final fantasy 15 is available here i'm going to spin that up and you'll see that starts going and i'm going to actually open up the task manager and show you just how much memory and sort of cpu resources this uses now i'm actually running this on a desktop gaming pc there's a 38 ti in here i also have intel core i9 11 900k so a bunch of stuff running i'm just going to close that real quick and probably try and get that to mute so we'll mute this stuff there we go let's try this again so it doesn't get too loud up in there and yeah so i have an 11 900 k so it's probably pretty much the best sort of desktop system unless you had an amd obviously um to sort of experience these apps on i actually ran these on a surface pro x earlier and they seem to be running pretty well so i will be doing a bunch of testing across a bunch of devices um but for now this is more of like a quick look at what you can sort of expect so we have a android game running here is final fantasy xv i'm not going to sort of play around too much with it obviously if you had a touch screen you're obviously going to get better sort of experience with the android games but obviously bluestacks has been on windows for quite some time so a lot of these android apps already work quite well on mouse and keyboard um i will spin up another game uh let's go for game of kings and that will launch here and load and you'll notice that it's around about two gig in my memory right now so it's it's like slowly starting to creep up if i launch more games side by side which is which is obviously kind of understandable since these games are going to take a little bit more than sort of like a kindle app you know just reading books side by side um but you can see it's creeping up to sort of like around about two and a half gig um i think that's probably round about what we were expecting for memory consumption and in terms of like the performance of the apps and like side by side if i if i try and snap these it feels very much like they're just basically windows apps so i can just snap them to the side i can have two of them side by side i can obviously open up other windows apps on top of this and the performance obviously on my processor and my particular system is really solid um we'll obviously have to look at that performance across a variety of devices but right now this feels very solid for an initial preview obviously we can't test out a bunch of different games because um they're not just quite there yet this one has just needed to sort of like restart so there's obviously some bugs here and there um i have noticed when you try and resize certain games like final fantasy 15 it kind of like basically restarts the game um so whereas on game of kings i don't think it does that no so you can sort of it doesn't really let you resize it but you it doesn't like you know try and restart the game i mean you can restart you can resize it smaller but not not too much larger there you go i don't think you can get much larger than that but yeah it doesn't restart the game like fine if it's fantasy 15. so it's going to be like a little bit of difference between how some of these android apps work and that's all developed you know it depends on how the developers actually created these apps but yeah and this is a basic real quick look at android apps on windows 11 and we're expecting i mean i'm hoping that this is going to come to all sort of windows 11 devices or supported ones um in the coming months um this preview seems pretty solid so far we just obviously need to see more apps and sort of how the performance works out but yeah that was a real quick look at android apps running on windows 11 for more check out theverge.com and don't don't forget to subscribe to our youtube channel