Windows Subsystem for Android™ and the Amazon Appstore will no longer be available in the Microsoft Store after March 5, 2025. #536
Replies: 70 comments 63 replies
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Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android™️ (WSA). As a result, the Amazon Appstore on Windows and all applications and games dependent on WSA will no longer be supported beginning March 5, 2025. |
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Typical MS. |
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This is very bad. |
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It would be solved by making it open source. Presumably it integrates quite closely with the windows kernel which they wouldn't want others to have but open sourcing it is a sure fire way to ensure its longevity |
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Such a disappointed. |
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feels bad. |
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Seems Microsoft were bitten by Google 💀 |
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any plan for WSA anternative ?? |
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I’m sorry but it was doomed to fail when there are virtually no apps in the Amazon Appstore. I haven’t seen any improvement made to the store ever since WSA launched. Almost everyone resorted to sideloading. |
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Pro tip to @microsoft: Amazon has failed with utilizing Android for a decade. Does anyone even remember that store exists? I've always used Google Play & Magisk etc since it first launched! |
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do you plan to remake it? |
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i don't think they have "plane" to remake wsl, no way they can get license from google... |
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Maybe open source it, since its discontinued now. |
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How very disappointing of Microsoft management to make this choice. At least open source it so that others can continue the project. |
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Wrong decision to use the bad Amazon Appstore...open it for the Play Store, revive it and it will be great. Switched from iPad to Win 11 tablet because of WSA!!!! Or open it for the community! Very bad decision for a feature running well (with Play Store hack...) |
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So Microsoft made a product, tied it to a horrible third party app store, refused to advertise it anywhere, and gave up two years later. What exactly was their strategy here? |
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They are so obsessed with Copilot that they don't give any care about other features in windows or whatever they make |
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Nobody is using Copilot, I know that since I don't. I do use ChatGPT and local LLM and Codeium in VSCode. But I really never used Copilot more than few times. Microsoft spent ( will lose, probably ) a $10 billion on a failing project that they can't monetize or generate ad revenue from consumers. They could have done a lot better with WSA if they ( Microsoft and Google ) swallowed their pride, have some under table agreement and shared revenue by adding the Play Store. Instead of competing with Google Play for PC ( which is still Beta, probably will go defunct soon too, it never took off after 2 years). |
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The public facing side of Co pilot is not what is ever going to make money, it's the gigantic developer and back end. Even if you do some development, if you don't know anyone that has ideas or pays for massive amounts of chat GPT/copilot etc or at least planning for it, then you don't know the people that are the money makers, the public facing side is not what actually matters except keeping it in the public's mind for Enterprise customers |
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Disappointed but not surprised |
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I'm disappointed. Open the source code |
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привет дисапоинтед)))) |
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This is only a kernel. Shortly, without complete open-source repo, it will be difficult for community developers to get WSA up and running again anytime soon. This is a huge setback for Windows 11 users and Microsoft's cross-platform development. |
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What kind of BS decision is that? Now that the DMA forces Google and Apple to let 3rd party markets, you kill the project? What the hell is that. Just make your own store and run it on Android and iOS! Now neither Google nor Apple can stop you from that, since the DMA (Digital Market Act) is effective! And have it preinstalled on windows, then you can pick the Windows and Android Audience, rather than (the previous attempts) of having developers migrate to porting Apps to Windows Mobile/Windows |
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I'll let you know from a prior experience I became aware of, that.. Adding insult to injury, the moderators of many Amazon repositories are extremely sensitive to criticism. Take what you will from that. But I completely agree and will likely be infuriated by the decision for many years. |
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WSA is Microsoft. Its just that I don't get it. DMA has been settled in stone for a while and effective for almost a year (May 2nd , 2023) which forces all platforms to open, read allow 3rd party stores. They could have made one or simply ported the windows store (android can run .NET applications) and use that as a 3rd party store and Google can't do anything against it but allow it due to the DMA (Digital Market Act). No more needing devs to port. give them attractive conditions (i.e. very low cut for the first 2 years they host their apps there) etc. to get people migrate to the new store, then they can offer their apps in both stores and have access to Android AND Windows User base |
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Agree, they should run their own store if the Amazon one was the issue. Though I'm guessing that's even more investments. Hell MS is already struggling to run their own app store and I doubt it is much profitable. The fact is the whole WSA project must have been really expensive as it is. Some genius at MS added up the numbers and decided to stop the bleeding and shut it down. |
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Honestly, I doubt. If EF Core and .NET Core any measure, there are at best 6-7 employees dedicated at it, probably less seeing how slow the rate of updates was in the past. i.e. the EF Core was running with 5 or 6 core members most of the time and is now at like 4? They do great job for the amount of developers that are put in there, but people shouldn't overestimate and think that just because Microsoft has 221k employees world-wide, every project is insanely expensive or has 100 of developers involved in it. That's what? 1 million per year? or 2? Peanuts for a company making billions in profits. More likely some manager saw, that there can be a few bucks saved and cut it. Same as happens in Automobile industry: Someone in the sales department see they can save 3 cents, multiply that with the parts built per year and see a 5 digit figure and thing: "Hey let's get that other supplier for this part, we can save 3 cents and xxxxx.yy per year on it. I am surely to get an promotion". By the time the part may have higher fail rate or lower quality and causes 7-digit damage in logistics department, because of higher return rate, dismantling already finished products or doing product recall campaign. End of the story: Company overall most more money, but the one person could put in a sticker on their wall for "saving 5-digit amount of money" while the other department gets blamed for the recalls. That's how real-world business works. |
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Like others here, I am very disappointed in this decision. WSA was an important feature in Windows for me. Running Android apps on the reliable, stable, and high-performance WSA built into Windows, rather than third-party emulators, is my daily routine. Could you please reconsider your decision or release it as open source? It's definitely an important feature. |
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WSA is neither high-perfomance nor built in feature. It's a virtual machine. |
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A virtual machine that performs well and without the need to launch a separate program for it. |
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One of the dumbest decisions Microsoft has ever made. They could've captured many who like to enjoy Android apps and the Android framework, because those users/players would've utilized those programms along with their regular Windows software. They could've had a huge market here by continuing WSA, and just instead get rid of this ridiculous Amazon App Store that nobody on this planet used. And they needn't even be surprised: Installing the Amazon App Store and WSA isn't as straight forward as it should be. You see, in many regions and countries around the world, you cannot even install the Amazon App Store and WSA without sideloading it to begin with, due to pointless regionlocks. So why are they all of a sudden shocked that they didn't manage to "capitalize" on that feature to begin with? Also, not every single thing has to be making profit, some things are for the long term, and Microsoft could've played the long-term gain with WSA, simply because developers for Android will utilize Windows even more than before, and because they could've always added what I am about to say now: Microsoft: Get rid of the Amazon App Store, keep developing & maintaining WSA, get Google to use it as a base for making "Google Play Games for PC" better and have better hardware compatibility, make some under-the-table deal with Google to let people download the Google Play Store directly from the Microsoft Store, and ask for a mere 5% revenue cut and BOOM, you got all you wanted. How can it be so difficult? Swallow your pride jfc... |
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If Google Play doesn't want to cooperate, just make it easy to install APKs directly (now it's kinda a hack) and maybe allow pulling them straight from an Android device (like |
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This is disappointing and a shame to see that Microsoft's response to whole situation is just to call off an entire project and not even give back to the community by making it open-source, even partially. To my knowledge, WSA was also used as a marketting material to advertise Windows 11 so I suppose it was all a marketting ploy just to get users in and then slowly take away the features... Why throw away all the hard work? |
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Why and what will be the alternative? |
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nothing |
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You can use BlueStacks though |
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BlueStacks is one of the most convoluted, bloated pieces of garbage I have ever had the misfortune of using over the years. I do not play games on Android, so that is literally the only reason I have ever seen anyone wanting to keep it around since WSA Came out on Windows. |
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Stereotypical Microsoft products aren't much different. |
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please open source it |
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They made $23+ billion in profit last fiscal year and they are short on few thousands to support this project, meh. |
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Nope, Nokia was never considered a Premium class. Samsung, Sony, HTC, Google, Xiaomi, One Plus, Apple were the Premium brands of that time (with HTC and Sony being practically absent these days). All others were mostly completing for the Low/Mid Range market.
Sorry to disappoint you, this "visionary invention" goes to the Linux community. |
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Ignoring your first comment because lol. Hmmm, so you are saying Microsoft is so desperate that they are....copying Linux community now?! I am absolutely flabbergasted and my day has been ruined! 😲😲😲 3 emoji just in case my surprise was not evident. |
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The joke is on you dude. Canonical (Ubuntu) came up with advertisements on Desktop in 2012. Do some research before making a joke out of yourself. What a troll |
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And where did I deny the fact, good sir? I was surprised (😦) why Microsoft is copying Linux! Is it because Windows is free? Poor MS! |
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I sure hope Microsoft are having a change of heart with the following news: |
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So is that like China only? Weird. I mean Microsoft is pushing for ARM too, right? Wouldn't it make sense to have Android apps too that were compiled for ARM? |
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Yeah, it's oddly in China only for now.
I thought as much too, but I guess that makes too much sense for classic microsoft, and they won't be microsoft if they weren't stupidly shooting themselves in the foot. |
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"Classic Microsoft" - this makes me recall several monopolistic behaviors they have engaged in over the years:
Microsoft is a giant. Google is too, and that is probably a strong reason we haven't seen them try to take Android yet. |
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Hopefully this means we will still have access to base WSA and the ability to hack Google Play into Windows in the future. Being able to run Android apps is literally a huge part of the value proposition of the new Surface Pro and will determine whether I shell out $2500+ to MS for the top end device + keyboard. For that much money, I want a better tablet than the iPad Pro and that involves running not only desktop BUT ALSO MOBILE APPS! To anyone at MS listening, that's your value proposition. Please don't let WSA die. |
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So, the interesting thing here from my perspective is that I have always seen the value of WSA as an enterprise feature. Our org was absolutely conducting internal test cases where we were running Surface Pro's with Android Apps that simply have no Windows equivalent. While I understand we were in the minority (the obsession for most was being able to run games... 🙄) our T&E results were quite positive and we were genuinely looking forward to being able to bring both ecosystems together. That of course has now been abandoned... |
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Loosers |
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Rats, my aging mother just died because the Tuya Home app wouldn't run on my windows, and her emergency alert failed to alert me on windows. Fell and broke hip, I was away from the android, working on windows. Hope my mother in law's emergency is better timed. |
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I really hope people can keep this thing working regardless of whether or not Microsoft decides to open-source the thing - Which would be doubtful of them to do, as much as I would love for it to happen, but who knows.. It's always good to retain at least some hope. Running Android apps on an PC in a way that felt almost close to an native experience was so amazing and I really, really wish that this could keep being a thing. |
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I don't know what the heck is happening with Microsoft right now, but they seem to go back more and more to their older selves. Well, at least it was a nice ride. |
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Please continue support in Canada, I use WSA instead of Android Studio emulation because of its better performance when developing. |
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Not only Canada. The whole world |
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I have seen this great project when I wanted to install it my PC was not fulfilling the requirement later I buy a good devices Now they killed the project. |
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It is your fault for buying good devices 😁 j/k. |
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Like the someone in the discussion earlier said the Microsoft just keeping it's focus on its AI hyped products ignoring the other potential products. |
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What alternative does Microsoft suggest when this is removed from the Windows distro? |
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ChromeOS |
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and others
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Windows Subsystem for Android™ and the Amazon Appstore will no longer be available in the Microsoft Store after March 5, 2025. Learn more.
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