As we know, Microsoft will officially make Windows 11 available for the general public starting October 11th, 2021. during the initial beta launch of the OS, Microsoft said that it was looking to bring Android apps to the Microsoft Store via the Amazon Appstore.
However, according to sources, the plan for Android App support has now been postponed to a later build and will not make it to the launch date. But there are still signs that Microsoft has internally started testing Android app support and we can soon the Amazon Appstore selling Android apps.
Amazon Appstore has now started to appear in the Microsoft Store, but for now, we need to access it manually and not via the Store app itself. The Amazon Appstore Preview is non-functional and could probably be a placeholder for now. However, not to be afraid as we know that users will still be able to sideload Android APKs once this feature goes live although apps depending on Google services may not run optimally.
To make the support for Android Apps possible, the windows maker will use Intel’s Bridge Technology, a runtime post-compiler that the Windows Subsystem for Android uses to translate ARM instructions to x86.
Some benchmarks have already shown how this will impact the performance of Windows, as we have seen on Geekbench when the Windows Subsystem for Android is being tested on various platforms including x86 and ARM.
The actual names of the CPUs are hidden even though we see 8-core, 12-core, and 20-core x86 placeholders along with 8-core ARM ones. These could likely be a variety of CPUs from the current 11th gen and upcoming 12th gen Alder Lake family; wonder what the 20-core part is, though.
In the tests, one of the ARM chips scored a single-core score of 828 and multi-core 3,047 however there was also an unnamed 20-core x86 processor that managed 571 and 4,908 scores in single and multi-core tests respectively.
We’ll soon find out how well Microsoft and CPU makers would optimize Windows Subsystem for Android. Let’s wait for the feature to get public soon.
