In a perplexing swerve, the new Windows 11 is going to run Android apps out of the box, integrating Amazon’s Android app store into Microsoft’s onboard app store. I have been running Windows since 1998 and running Android since the T-Mobile G1, and this seems like a half-fast plan doomed to fail.
There are reasons to run Android apps on Windows. Specifically, some popular Android messaging and social-media apps (such as TikTok) don’t have native Windows versions. It may smooth your work- or life-flow to be able to interact with all of these apps using a physical keyboard and a single device.
But Microsoft can’t get around Google’s absolute, crushing dominance of the Android app world in the US. Although Android is an “open” platform (unlike iOS), nearly every Android phone outside China comes preloaded with Google Play. That makes Google’s app store the default and often the only choice for most Android app developers.
I saw this when reviewing Amazon’s most recent line of Fire tablets. The Fire HD 10 productivity bundle got absolutely slated as app after app wasn’t available on the Amazon Appstore—Signal, Slack, Rome2Rio, Booking.com, Google Sheets, what have you. Those specific apps aren’t a big deal on Windows, which has its own apps or terrific browser-based versions of those services. But when something awesome comes to Android, it often doesn’t come to the Amazon Appstore. At all.
The best possible outcome of this is that the huge new audience of potential Windows users will revitalize the Amazon Appstore and lead app developers to put their products in there. That is a thing that could happen, sure. I wouldn’t put money on that bet. Look at Microsoft itself for why: The official Windows app store has always had the entirety of the Windows 10 install-base to serve, and it isn’t great.
Other non-Google Play Android app stores exist. In the US, they’re the shady back-alleys of the Android world. Fdroid is all open-source software. APKMirror and similar sites basically rip app packages out of Google Play and repost them, often without permission. Because they’re largely gray-market marketplaces, the software on them may be illegitimately posted and not monitored or maintained by the developers.
There are currently two major ways to run Android apps on a Windows PC. The Your Phone app, used with a Samsung Galaxy phone, lets you remote-control your phone’s apps from your PC. You aren’t really running the apps on your PC, but you can use them as if they were PC apps. That way, you can ‘run’ any app from the Google Play store. Until your phone isn’t close to the PC, at least.
The second main way is with an Android emulator called Bluestacks. Bluestacks boots Android in a virtual machine on your Windows system and lets you drop in app files. Naturally, it largely relies on the Google Play store for the app files.
Throwing Shade at Apple
All of this happens in the context of the spectacular, ongoing litigation between Apple and Epic Games around Apple’s app store being the only way to get apps on an iPhone.
Apple has been pushing the narrative that if people are allowed to download apps or subscribe to services by other means, its platform would become a sink of horrifying malware—you know, like Android is. Except that the Google Play Store isn’t a sink of malware. Neither is the Amazon Appstore.
Rather, what would probably happen if sideloading was enabled is that a few big-time apps with their own brands, such as Epic Games and Netflix, would be able to stop paying Apple’s 30% tax on purchases and subscriptions, the vast majority of smaller developers would stay in Apple’s store, and no real competitor would develop in the US because of the power of defaults. No one really likes installing multiple app stores.
Apple doesn’t want to admit this because it means its app-store argument is truly about revenue and not safety. However, the experience of the Amazon Appstore on Android shows it to be true. The power of defaults, and the weakness of Amazon’s position in Android apps, make Microsoft’s Windows 11 Android app plan into a curiosity rather than a major selling point.
