In mid-2021, Microsoft announced the new Windows 11 and surprised us all not only because of the unexpectedness of a new version of the system almost out of nowhere, but also because of the promise that it would allow run android apps natively, integrating the Amazon Appstore into the Microsoft Store.
The promise was not fulfilled at launch, another of the ignored details of Windows 11, but in the Insider versions of Windows 11 it is possible to try the new Android subsystem for Windows for some time. This is precisely what I have been doing and the experience, unfortunately, is a disappointment.
For now there is (almost) nothing in the Windows 11 Amazon Appstore… but that’s not the only problem
The Android subsystem for Windows 11 that we can currently test is completely limited to a custom version of the Amazon Appstore that you can only use it with an Amazon account in the United States and that has only fifty apps.
The available apps are definitely not great, and the little or no usefulness of these is blatant. They are obviously apps for Android, designed for a mobile, not even for a tablet, and the experience is simply… lacking.
This is fairly obvious. we can not expect apps that are designed for large screens, keyboard and mouse, or to take advantage of all the features of a modern PC. What we have is the option of being able to install a mobile app on our PC for whatever reason.
If your case is similar to mine, there probably aren’t any apps for you that you use that don’t already have a native desktop version for Windows that does everything better on the computer, or in any case, a web version that you can open in the browser and offer a better experience easily.
Performance, alternatives, public
The other detail that disappointed me a lot was the performance, at least in my experience on a laptop with an i7 10750H, 8 GB of RAM, a GTX 1650 and SSD storage, not only the Amazon Appstore is quite slow, but all Android app windows have lag. And it’s not a problem for all of Windows 11, because Steam and Xbox games run perfectly fine.
We can’t judge this too harshly anyway, after all we’re talking about a preliminary version and it can improve a lot by the time it’s ready. However, it does not leave a good taste in the mouth.
When you can play Doom Eternal smoothly but Clash of Kings is laggy on Windows 11
The audience for this feature will surely exist, but it will most likely be a fairly small niche. Users who for some reason need something that is only for Android and does not have a better version for Windows, because it makes no sense to install an app through this Appstore when there is a better version of it designed for the desktop and with better performance.
In any case, where it would be most interesting is perhaps at the level of games and a huge number of Android mobile games that you could easily play now on Windows, without the need for third-party emulators.
And yet, for that audience there will soon be a solution from Google itself called Google Play Games that it will also work on Windows 10 without the need for the Android subsystem for Windows.
If you would like to break out of the Microsoft/Amazon fence and install the Google Play Store on Windows 11, that is also possible, but the process is extremely complicated and you have to ask yourself if its benefits are really worth it for you. That’s the important detail at the end, whether it’s a useful feature or is going to be used as little as iOS apps on macOS.