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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

I found WSA kind of handy to run Pocket Casts on old Microsoft Surface Tablet. Had to jump through some hoops to install Google Play first.

What's the best alternative? Bluestacks seems very shady. Chrome OS Flex in a VM? (Scratch that. It looks like Chrome OS Flex doesn't allow Android apps)

P.S. Do we make "jokes" about Microsoft killing things off like we do with Google?

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> What's the best alternative?

Waydroid runs Android apps on Linux and some people claim to have gotten it to work on WSL.

- Waydroid: https://waydro.id

Reddit threads:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/eofn...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/waydroid/comments/10y813d/is_it_pos...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/waydroid/comments/14e6t3g/does_maki...

Waydroid was a bliss to install on fedora. It does run very well now, a big improvement from the first releases

Does Waydroid have problem running arm apks on x86 architecture?

libhoudini and libndk are libraries that translate ARM instructions to x86. There's an installation script for Waydroid:

https://github.com/casualsnek/waydroid_script

> P.S. Do we make "jokes" about Microsoft killing things off like we do with Google?

Well someone went ahead and made https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

Fun site! A few products were pretty nostalgic, others were... interesting!

>ILoo

>Killed almost 21 years ago, iLoo was a smart portable toilet integrating the complete equipment to surf the Internet from inside and outside the cabinet. It was 13 days old.

The difference for me is that the Killed by Microsoft has products I never used or cared about or I'm happy they killed them (looking at you Visual Sourcesafe) - cool site though - very interesting retrospective.

On the Microsoft campus, there is a building where the courtyard is tiled with commemorative "shipped in ..." plaques for various products. It has long since stopped being updated because there's simply no room for new ones. Walking there can be an interesting experience - very few people would recognize the majority of those product titles.

I found the best alternative to be the Pocket Casts web player. It's not as good as the mobile app, but I find it serviceable.

We are more cynical with Microsoft, and joke about embrace extend extinguish.

What's wrong with the pocket casts webapp?

I use the android version through WSA because it supports chapters which the web version doesn't and it also does a better job of remembering my location when I switch from it to my actual phone than the web app does.

Loses some of the audio features, such as Trim Silence and per-podcast speed and skip settings.

Only available to paid subscribers.

Can this be run in Hyper-V?

https://www.android-x86.org/

The trick to that is similar to the Intel/Apple split: just having the OS doesn't help if the apps are for a different architecture. (I'm aware of qemu/Rosetta/etc but that's not something that Android has ever tried to solve (AFAIK) - rather, they declare any native library packages at the .apk level and one is expected to pick the right installer for the right architecture)

I think that Android-x86 has an ARM emulator.

Doesn't Dalvik/ART compile Java Bytecode down to a native layer anyway, so this wouldn't matter?

It does matter because lots of Android apps (esp. games) have native-code bits in them that are linked in with JNI.

It's not just games – anything multimedia (video, audio, pictures, even my e-book reader) is another likely candidate for including native libraries, and some other apps, too.

Plus Android for x86 has the same problem that it doesn't have officially supported versions of the Google Play APIs which lead to Microsoft relying on the Amazon Store and Amazon's strange fork of Google Play APIs to get any number of apps to run (which was a tiny subset of what Android users consider "Android apps").

X86 Android has a Rosetta like emulator allowing you tu run ARM games on Intel perfectly. WIth GLTools you just emulate a virtual Nvidia Tegra 2/3 GPU per app and that will do the trick.

> I'm aware of qemu/Rosetta/etc but that's not something that Android has ever tried to solve (AFAIK)

Not Google itself (they're seemingly going for a hard transition with their current Pixel phones), but some OEMs (I'm aware of Xiaomi at least) have included such things now that recent ARM CPUs have started dropping 32-bit support.

Haven’t messed with either personally, but maybe Waydroid can be coaxed into running through WSL?

Yeah I bought a Robo & Kala 2-in-1 because the Arm processor would play great with WSA apps… If this disappears on my system, that’s a lot of functionality gone.

Maybe I should have just held out for a MacBook Air… Lesson learned

What's wrong with pocket casts web?

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