Wine On Android Is Coming For Running Windows Apps

[Rexilion]

Running PC applications on an phone is useless.

PC applications are designed for keyboard and mouse input.
Smartphone apps are designed for touch input.

Not if those applications are programmed for the native Windows 8 interface... right?

[kuco]

Running PC applications on an phone is useless.

PC applications are designed for keyboard and mouse input.
Smartphone apps are designed for touch input.

?? just because it's less convenient doesnt make it useless. touchscreen = mouse, onscreenkeyboard = keyboard. and alot of applications work well without ANY keyboard input (aoe2 f.e). there's even psx and n64 emulators for phones emulating gamepads. so keyboard+mouse "emulation" shouldnt be much of a problem.

[Rexilion]

there's even psx and n64 emulators for phones emulating gamepads.

That would be a legitimate reason for me to ditch my old (ancient?) SE K800i .

[bobwya]

Hate to mention the elephant in the room... But what about the tonne of software that doesn't yet run on Wine on a Linux-based Desktop System?? I'm subscribed to the Wine Bug ML and it's inundated everyday with new (open) bugs...

Don't get me wrong I love the project (and moderate a few WineHQ AppDB pages) but it's bitten off a huge target - more than the current developer team can cope with...

[ldesnogu]

Michael dropped some pretty strong hints, ie WINE devs hoping for increased adoption of Android on x86 and WINE ARM being covered separately.

That's my understanding. And that's funny given that Codeweaver couldn't demonstrate WINE on a native x86 Android platform. This hardware is quite rare in fact and I'm not sure we'll see many x86 Android tablets in the short term, and the focus seems to be on Windows 8 (for instance Atom Z2760 is only supported on Windows).

OTOH they could have used some Android-x86 image on a desktop/laptop rather than relying on QEMU used in Android SDK. Or even better they could have used Intel HW Accelerated Execution Manager. Both of these options should be very fast.

[Rexilion]

Hate to mention the elephant in the room... But what about the tonne of software that doesn't yet run on Wine on a Linux-based Desktop System?? I'm subscribed to the Wine Bug ML and it's inundated everyday with new (open) bugs...

For some software that does not run, there is a Linux equivalent. For all else, why not use a VM? Besides, extending wine to other platforms might help it contain more code that will make more software work.

[uid313]

Not if those applications are programmed for the native Windows 8 interface... right?

Applications programmed for the native Windows 8 interface (widely-known as Metro, officially "Modern UI") are not written in Win32 API, which is what Wine implements.

They're written in HTML5 with JavaScript using WinJS.
Or C# / .NET which is Mono, not Wine.

So yeah, still useless.

[Rexilion]

They're written in HTML5 with JavaScript using WinJS.

So they can implement WinJS, with stuff like this. It would be really brutal to let these apps integrate with apps from the Linux repository. Have them sit side by side as if nothing ever changed :P . Or am I way off here? ...

[Kristian Joensen]

Yeah, Michael completely left out the most important part.

Is WINE suddenly going to be an emulator so it can run x86 code on ARM? Are they just porting winelib, so that windows developers can recompile their code for WINE on ARM? Is it just meant for Win8 ARM apps?

Can someone please tell me what I am missing here?:

A)Using Wine to run Windows for ARM applications/apps on Android running on an ARM device requires no emulation.
B)Using Wine to run Windows for X86/X86-64 applications/apps on Android running on a X86/X86-64 device require no emulation.
C)Both A) and B) are useful.

So where does the emulation everyone is talking about come in? The emulation Michael was talking about in the article was just Android it self running on an emulator not an actual phone or tablet or other device, right?

[jalyst]

Is there interest from Codeweavers/others in making this more generic, so that it isn't necessarily targeted for Android & only Android?
There is after all other mobile Linux/FOSS platforms that are just starting out, & trying to gain traction/interest etc...