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Comment by stephc_int13 | Hacker News Reader

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stephc_int13·

I think that WSL is useful and used by many.

WSA, not so sure. Who is using it? They very likely have telemetry and thus usage.

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> enables your Windows 11 device to run Android applications that are available in the Amazon Appstore

This might be the crux of it. Google probably will never port the Play store to Windows, MS doesn't want to maintain their own Android app store, and Amazon is a competitor with a pretty uncompelling app store to boot.

Google actually has ported Play Store to Windows, just for games though: https://play.google.com/googleplaygames

I'm using it from time to time. A lot of consumer equipment nowadays can only be operated with Android and iOS apps. For all those things I need WSA the Apps are off course not available in the official Amazon App Store, so i had to manually download them from f-droid and side load them with ADB.

I can see why WSA is not such an often used subsystem.

Edit: It was not f-droid, they don't provide APKs for copyright protected apps. It was shady mirroring websites that re-upload APKs from the Google Play Store. (downloading and installing from those sites is legal where I live).

My laptop has a 4g module so I use WSA to run my mobile providers app. So I can monitor usage and buy more packages when I run out of data.

> Who is using it?

Android app developers on Windows is a disappointed group on Twitter at least

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