Posted On 03 Jul 2021

Microsoft has surprised the IT industry by announcing that the new version of Windows 11 will have the native capacity to support Android apps. The latest iteration of the dominant operating system incorporates a new Windows store, and it will be possible to use this to access Amazon’s Appstore to download Android apps and run them on PCs.

Users who visit the Appstore will be able to download apps and pin them to their taskbar or snap them in with standard Windows apps. In addition, Microsoft has partnered with Intel, using the Intel Bridge system to allow the use of Android apps, though they will continue working with AMD and Arm systems as well.

Microsoft has chosen to make the new capacity available on Windows 11 in order to compete with Apple, which has used its M1 chips to allow users to run iOS apps within the Mac OS. There are a substantial number of web-based mirrors of mobile apps, but these frequently don’t offer the same functionality and a number of popular apps such as Snapchat and numerous home automation apps don’t have web versions.

At the launch of the new functionality, Microsoft showed how Windows 11 could run apps such as TikTok, and many other popular apps such as Uber and Yahoo were listed as running with the new capacity. It has yet to be explicitly stated to what extent current devices will be able to use the new Android capacity; Microsoft is heavily supporting the use of the Intel Bridge hardware as being the optimal means of running the apps.

Microsoft does have history in terms of running Android, though not a very successful one. In 2015 the company launched Project Astoria, a plan to help Windows developers adapt Android apps to use on the system, but this lasted less than a year before the company admitted that it was unnecessarily complicated. It has long been Microsoft’s desire to run Android apps natively on Windows, and capacity was nearly included in Windows 10, but this was sidelined in the push to persuade developers to use the ultimately unsuccessful Universal Windows Platform.

Allowing Android apps to be directly integrated in Windows marks a notable change of policy; although Microsoft has been happy to work with Android as a mobile iteration of Windows for some time, the ability to run mobile apps directly in Windows is a significant step forward.