104 replies
4d
So, this is the second time a "run your Android apps on Windows" initiative fizzles out: before WSA (which was Amazon-centric), there was a late-2020 "Your Phone" feature that (briefly) allowed Samsung apps on Windows desktops.
Not sure if this means anything other than "phone apps run best on, well, a phone", especially since I can't think of anything from my phone that I would truly like on my desktop, other than instant messages, which are already available in various ways?
I haven't tried it, but allegedly Outlook for Android runs better on Windows than the new Outlook for Windows. Which makes some sense, as one is a native app and one is a web app.
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/i-ac...
Yeah I don't know how they plan to shaft business users with that. It's so slow.
I noticed recently that Microsoft relented and soon starts introducing CoPilot features into old outlook (or 'real' or 'full' outlook as people are calling it at work). Previously it was coupled to 'new' outlook only to promote adoption. But it really sees a lot of pushback from users. I hope this will continue into not canning the real outlook at all.
Microsoft are always pushing 'more change management' as a 'solution' but some changes are simply not good and it's normal for users to resist. If anything they push too much (like turning on features by default, and sending reminders that you have not used feature xyz enough last week through Viva Insights)
And the skullduggery they're doing with the consumer windows mail migration (pulling the user's email into their cloud without making this very clear) is totally out of line IMO.
Personally I don't even hate the web version so much. I use it daily because Microsoft never made a native outlook for my platform anyway. But I'm not a heavy user of mail and I do see its limitations.
New Outlook still doesn't handle S/MIME. That means it's between annoying to useless in large companies, depending on the volume of such e-mails you're getting.
What email client is popular in large enterprises then? Last time I worked in a company like that it was all microsoft software, including outlook, by policy
Old Outlook, as 'w3ll_w3ll_w3ll said.
Here's the thing though: Microsoft is rather heavy-handed about pushing "New Outlook" and "New Teams". New Outlook is mostly just a wrapped webapp - so slightly cleaner than the old one, but otherwise much slower and less functional. Now, guess which Outlook has had support for Copilot for the past couple months? :).
Right now it's mostly an annoyance - I have to switch back and forth couple times a day, depending on whether I need "snooze e-mail" or S/MIME at any given moment. But the latter is really a dealbreaker. Strange for a product sold to corporations, which makes me think that MS is planning to get people off e-mails entirely.
Yeah new teams is much less of an annoyance in terms of change as it was already a slow web app and users don't really expect much from it. And the UI didn't change at all.
They bogged it down with too many features and now they're trying to scrape it up by having a slightly more optimised framework, which is basically still exactly the same, it's now just based on edge instead of chrome which we all know are really the same thing under the hood anyway.
So where new teams is just a cutesy little badge on the same thing, new outlook is really a serious deprecation.
And yeah they're trying to get people off email for sure. Microsoft even have banners of "don't mail but teams" under their consultants' emails.
Makes sense from a strategic perspective to move from an open platform to something they fully control and own. It's the old lock-in game they've always played, after their initial strategy of Embracing Extend failed on email (they made a huge attempt but Google was very successful so the same and now there's a kinda duopoly stalemate they can never win)
If Apple can have feature parity between a Mac-ass Mac app and a Web app, why can't Microsoft? Why does Microsoft need to reduce its feature set to the lowest common denominator?
I'm of course talking of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.
On the one side: Microsoft seems to be trying to work towards feature parity with New Outlook but its an application being built in the open with the most agile of agile and there's no clear time horizon of when that parity will happen. Every month or so there's new features and more feature parity (it likes to tell you that, too).
On the other side: Old Outlook grew to be an organic mess of COM components, duct tape, and glitter. Some of those COM components that people think of as "native functionality" was second-party and third-party components written by a weird grab bag of companies, including some that no longer exist. Expecting full feature parity from Outlook sounds to me like an impossible task, especially because how can Microsoft know all those third-party components? It almost seems like a case where a new brand might have been better, but it's also hard to blame Microsoft with realizing that they have a lot to lose if they kill the Outlook brand.
(I'm willing to bet S/MIME was based on fragile old IE code. I'm somewhat happy in New Outlook now, but I find I keep having to switch to Old Outlook for silly "required" corporate Add-Ins that use old APIs and haven't upgraded yet/give the impression that they might not upgrade ever.)
They still broke some things. Instead of custom contact lists in Chat, you're supposed supposed to use the People app, and until just right now, that one didn't (!) show the presence status of each contact. It seems that very very recently they've finally fixed that, although it's still less compact and at-a-glance than the old contact list.
And "Notify when available" is annoyingly missing in New Teams, too.
Old Outlook
Real outlook... not Outlook Online wrapped in a WebView2 wrapper
Microsoft love to force things onto end users these days. The latest thing is the "focussed inbox". Suddenly our school had it enabled and a whole bunch of people didn't see their emails as it hived them off to the Other tab.
Yeah and their evangelisation makes it really hard to opt out. They're always making it a show to portray users not using it as slowpokes who don't keep up.
Even though I don't want Microsoft to decide what's important and not in my inbox. I get so little I can easily do that myself because I block any and all unsolicited sales attempt forever - which Microsoft is trying to make harder because those people are their customer too! For while the 'new outlook' didn't even have the block sender option. Only the less severe report spam. But I want to block them (and ideally their entire company) forever.
This strategy works great for me and I often gloat over my trash folder with the many sales emails there "I know you're busy, you probably forgot to respond to my 20 previous emails but I proposed you another meeting, does tomorrow 2:00 suit? Here's the invite!". I love seeing them waste their time. Most of them seem actually manual even (despite most not even seeming to have bothered reading what I actually do)
I really hate Microsoft's approach to change management. They're only advocating what's best for them, not for the users. There's no win-win here, it's all them and they don't even attempt to hide it except under a really thin sleazy sales veneer.
Setup a block rule, they are still there. Send it straight to that rule. The rule should nuke the email before it hits the mailbox.
I thought they were done developing the old outlook since they started hacking it instead of doing things properly. For example, in the rounded corner update for the old outlook, they started drawing black squares over message pane during resizing, probably to hide visual defects.
Glad to know there is a chance that they might keep the old outlook around.
I'd assume that would probably be more that "CoPilot all-the-things" took priority over "leave Outlook in maintenance-only mode".
Even the "round all the corners" changes seemed mostly "free" from component library upgrades from changes in other Office and Windows apps and components shared with "New Outlook" (on the one side: people keep assuming New Outlook is a bloated web app, especially because it has a lot of UI consistency with Outlook.com now, but there's a lot of evidence it is more complicated that just a web app; on the other side: a lot of those painting problems especially during resizing relate to Old Outlook has been partly "a web app" for a long time; hybrids apps are hybrid).
its sort of the business model at this point. you cant just subscribe to security updates without new features. to justify the cost they always have to cram new, and by new i mean change.
google feels the same way. things that work need to be rebuilt and rereleased to justify headcount.
the mail -> new outlook is just another in the long tradition of microsoft pushing a new native gui framework, only to abandon it in house. How can they ever expect developers developers developers to commit to another future abandonware.
https://irrlicht3d.org/index.php?t=1626
they really should be going in reverse and making all their apps pure native and then getting them to also render as html.
With Google, they intentionally bloat their OS/app updates so that users are eventually forced to upgrade for decent performance again.
Slow is the least of its problems. There are missing features all over the place. For instance, you can no longer drag emails to the desktop or into another app.
Outlook is hot garbage and has been for a lot time. Every single version.
Bad take. The old native Outlook is actually great. The web version is fine.
The new Electron monster is horrible and looks like a toy.
I don't think it's a bad take at all.
The very latest and greatest version of Outlook, has broken Search. Not in a subtle way, no, as in the "remove focus from the goddamn text box after you've typed a couple of characters" kind of broken.
I've had to remove and re-add accounts to fix Outlook issues more than all other email client issues combined. This is especially prevalent with the mobile versions.
Do you know how many times I've had to reset the view after Outlook, for no reason discernible, decided to change it, delete it or simply corrupt the file. I stopped counting after I had to start using scientific notation.
We'll continue to disagree on the App versions of Outlook.
The web version is ok.. I will agree with you on that point.
Agreed. Outlook native gets extremely confused when the desktop resolution/scaling changes. It also uses as an old version of IE/Trident (?!) to render HTML e-mails, which is very painful to work with when trying to build rich e-mail notifications.
IIRC it's even worse. It's not Trident, but Word's HTML renderer.
Scary if true!
I keep having that view change too, never been able to work out why. It's very annoying.
I can't operate without it (the Windows native version). Everything else pales in comparison from a productivity standpoint.
I operate despite it's best efforts. I'm glad you have a different experience.
I can say that New Outlook is slow as fuck, does counterintuitive things (especially with actions on multiple selections), and has hordes of other somewhat annoying bugs (for example, deleting many emails will often count you as a double click.
Still using the Outlook application installed on Windows. Recently purchased Office 2021 (for $40, they had a sale) which came with the Outlook application. It does get updates every now and then so I know they're still supporting it. I've been using the Outlook application for a few decades, no plan to stop, and I will never use their online version.
The prior mail app lacked many things/opening images and such was broken, but it was incredibly lightweight and did its job, then MS decided to kill it and add a gigabloated version of web outlook that runs worse than outlook directly on the web...
Never change Microsoft
The SMS and Calls.
Seriously, at this point, my phone is the least useful device I own for managing both of these functions. The only utility in having them in some broken down hard to use form is for the slight convenience of being able to use them outside of my home if I wanted to. I rarely want to. I'd much prefer these functions to be on my PC.
It'd also mean I could just ignore my phone much more effectively and just pick up on everything at my desk when i get home.
I use KDE connect for that on Windows too, it does both SMS and calling. Your phone only needs to be in the same network which isn't an issue on your desk when you get home.
How exactly do you do SMS and Calling on Windows? I have KDE Connect installed, and it has SMS and telephone integration checked, but I don't see any notifications or anything. https://i.imgur.com/JQphE16.png
Phone Link also works relatively well... native Microsoft app.
Yeah KDE connect fan here - works great absolutely amazing piece of open source software.
I use the GConnect implementation of KDE Connect and it works really well... except for the SMS forwarding.
It has all the usual issues of this kind of mirroring software: (1) once in a while it falls out of sync. (2) the messaging UI is really spartan (and for some reason doesn't support OS-level spell check?) (3) MMS support is either spotty or missing (4) notifications occasionally just stop happening.
I'm still grateful for it and use it everyday, but GConnect is #1 on my list of "once I get some time to do OSS stuff again".
I had no idea it could do that, I've only been using it to move files between my devices.
If you're using Android (presumably with Google), there's Google Messages on Web that handles SMS:
https://messages.google.com/web/
I used it for several years and found it quite reliable, unlike Apple's way of handling SMS/iMessage on each Apple device separately.
Agreed. I type half my texts in Firefox these days using the Google messages web frontend. Supports RCS too!
The one downside is, after i've typed 15 texts, the other person is still punching in their first on a touchscreen.
This is probably just a matter of other people not drinking enough coffee, however.
If only google can buy some "search" technology for using in this app..
Beeper does this as well, including many more things like signal and whatsapp
I use this daily.
Works even better as a "install to home screen" app on my Mac.
This is largely how I've operated for years with Google Voice: doing all of my SMS/MMS messaging and outbound calls (inbound, not so much) from the voice.google.com web app in my desktop browser.
If my life circumstances were a bit different, I could happily live without a phone and minutes+data plan. As it is, my wife would not approve...
My primary number has been a Google Voice number for a decade, and when I do use my actual phone for SMS/MMS and calls, I'm using the Voice app on there too.
Just in case others are curious:
They also killed the forwarding of SMS years ago, so when you get an SMS you have to get it through the Voice app
I’ve been using Google Voice this way too since 2011. Recently I have been considering porting my number out as the iOS app has become incredibly slow to the point of almost nonfunctional. Have you had a similar experience?
I'm on Android. The Android app has never been very snappy nor bug-free for me (I've also used older, low-end phones, for what that's worth), but I think it has generally gotten better over time.
+1 I hate having to switch between my phone and desktop which feels like a waste of time when I'm already at my desk, which is almost all 7 days a week.
I would like to have my phone only be used for calls and SMS and nothing else. All the messenger apps, email, browsing is better off on my desktop.
Typing on phone and doing anything that involves multiple apps is much more work compared to using a desktop.
Get a burner phone without a SIM and leave it at work.
I have Android and I can turn off notifications. This is my default except for Signal which my immediate family is on (they call on it too).
SMS is mostly SPAM, so definitely off. I would never pick up a call originating from my carrier.
For your scenario:
Do the same for all notifications, and only check phone when you want to, when home?
Windows supports this out of the box (via the Phone Link app), it works reasonably well in my experience.
We are starting to offer a new product for this for small business/startups. It is still pretty early and we're just starting to expand into the US, but it is something (https://nucleus.com/).
If you're counting that, than this is the 3rd time.
The first one was Project Astoria, whose ashes gave birth to WSL.
That would have been WSL1, right? As in, the thing that tried to implement Linux syscall interfaces on top of the Windows kernel?
The current thing (WSL2) is "just" a VM (with lots of work to make it work nicer)…
It's really funny, NT was supposed to be great at three things:
- be easily ported to different hardware architectures, which then never actually became relevant (and nowadays macOS is the best example for actual architecture migrations!)
- have a much more sophisticated and elaborate security model than those filthy unices (and now we're getting sudo on Windows, because 30 years later, it's still too complicated for anyone to use as intended)
- allow fluid switching between different userlands, be it win32, OS/2 (RIP), Unix (RIP), and anything else you could want in the future! (except no, you're getting VMs now)
Eh, they did 2 migrations while supporting at most 2 architectures concurrently. Nothing compared to Linux which is maintained for x86, POWER, ARM, s390x, MIPS etc concurrently
Does Linux allow you to run your s390x binary on your ARM system? No.
As others have pointed out macOS allowed migration including existing binaries. They have done 3 of these migrations. 68k to PowerPC, PowerPC to x86, and x86 to ARM. Each time, users were allowed to bring along existing binaries and keep using them and each time the binaries from the previous system generally ran as fast or faster on the new system. As far as I am aware, Linux has never done anything like this.
There are applications for that on Linux (qemu and box64/box86 being the best known), they just aren't installed by default on most distros.
A large part of why the binaries ran well on macOS migrations is that each time the migration came with a substantial processor speed increase. This meant that emulated/translated binaries were able to roughly match their previous performance, while native binaries for the new architecture were significantly faster. On Linux, however, the most common reason for cross-architecture tech these days is running x86 binaries on something like a Raspberry Pi, which means a slower processor on top of the translation layer - so non-native apps see a huge drop in performance.
x64 Linux supports x86 and PE binaries so it sort of does.
There are a few Mac apps out there that support PPC, x86, and ARM all in the same binary. One such app is XLD[0].
[0]: https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html
But contrast that to Microsoft's absolutely hilariously inept attempts at bringing Windows to ARM. The amount of cumulative money spent over the last 15 or so years versus the actual market penetration is insane.
macOS did migrations. Linux is just supported on those architectures at the same time without any real layer that allows users to switch from for example x86 to ARM without recompiling the entire world to match.
Commercially relevant, perhaps, but it has remained technically relevant: The NT Kernel has historically operated on lots of different hardware architectures and continues to run on a small variety today. The ARM port is still active and a living branch even if total hardware sales are fewer than projected and Microsoft ceded most of that hardware space commercially when they gave up on Phones.
That "sudo for windows" still leverages the elaborate Windows ACL model. It's not like they are also porting Linux kernel security on top of Windows. They just realized that both "RunAs.exe" and PowerShell's "Start-Process" have more complicated CLIs than necessary for simple UAC cases and decided to copy the CLI arguments of a well known CLI.
Turns out users don't actually want to switch userlands on the fly and when they do VMs feel more right as an abstraction?
More (RIP) than OS/2 or the various attempts at POSIX userlands, Windows 8 actually tried to deliver a truly modern userland as a wholesale new experience, failed spectacularly. Switching was fluid and felt good if you enjoyed the new userland (which had some extraordinary, noticeable benefits in bootup and power/battery usage and other things). Coordination between the two userlands got really good in 8.1. The final lessons that seemed to come from Windows 8 was to never try that again because users hated it and didn't understand it. (I still lament how much of "didn't understand it" was so much more of a failure of education and PR and marketing and incidentals more than technical problems. There was some great technical appeal of a chance to move from win32 to a userland that was greener [both as in pastures and ecologically].)
As someone that believed into the WinRT dream, I am deeply sour with how WinDev managed the whole story, it wasn't only the users not wanting to adopt the new world.
Microsoft itself made a mess out of the developer experience.
Now I am back to distributed computing, and for anything Windows the classical frameworks are good enough.
The issue with VMs for Linux, which Windows isn't the first, rather the last from several attempts done by UNIX vendors, and IBM/Unisys mainframes/micros is that Linux kernel syscalls have become more relevant than POSIX.
Thus it is easier and cheaper to plug a Linux VM, than implement POSIX, and then get the same kind of complaints from Linux folks using macOS, or other UNIX proper environments.
Unix is not RIP, thanks to WSL1 still being maintained on Windows 11. Original Unix subsystem is discontinued though.
Who cares, everyone either misplaces ACL's or ran everything as Administrator or close.
Under Linux/Unix, we had ACL's too, but nobody used them unless you were in a networked environment.
Not super well supported, but there's a Samsung Dex app for Windows and MacOS (I think unsupported now) that let's you plug your phone into your computer, and get Dex in a window. Runs the phone apps on the phone, gets your android store etc. but you get an "ok" minimal desktop that lets you do your phone stuff with a mouse and keyboard.
After I figured that out I basically dropped all the run Android on a desktop things.
There's also https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy which works for any Android, not just Samsung
Unfortunately a non-starter since it requires USB Debugging Mode, which these days most programs if they see it will refuse to run.
I have never in my life seen an app that cared about adb being enabled. I'm willing to believe that you've encountered them, but I'm gonna question "most programs".
Also no way to trigger DeX/Android Desktop mode without some kind of fake HDMI dongle.
I remember sometime in the last decade Google had an extension to run Android apps in Chrome. I tested it with a comics app, which I wanted for the bigger screen, and it worked fine. When I tried to search for the extension years later I couldn't find it.
I remember ARChon Runtime: https://archon-runtime.github.io/
while not as fun as "in Chrome," I can this second run quite a few Android apps in ChromeOS on my Pixelbook. They are a UI abomination, but it does give me "local" access to 1Password and a few other things which would be annoying as PWAs
It was called ARC Welder.
Sometimes I go to this coworking space. They have an iOS/Android app you need to use to book a desk, message the admins, unlock the front door, pay, etc. No web app. Forces me to get my phone out when I’d rather just stay on my laptop. If I could run their app on my laptop (haven’t looked into it yet), I’d like that
It forces you to consent to whatever arbitrary EULA that the people running the coworking space probably haven't read.
You can do that in a webapp too. At first login, you have to click "Agree" to lengthy terms and conditions displayed. Until you click "Agree", your login session is only good for the terms screen, not the rest of the webapp.
Some of the challenger banking apps are mobile only which might be a use-case. Ideally I'd like to see them offer a desktop/responsive web app though
Most of these use device attestation anyways so they are unlikely to run on Windows. The bank wants to ensure that the user doesn't have root access which isn't the case on Windows.
I was using the Google Photos map search via BlueStacks on my Windows machine briefly, but that's only because Google made the perplexing decision to not put that on desktop.
It's not perplexing, it's pure business. "Mobile-first" has been the dogma for a decade already for a reason. dO yOu GuYs NoT hAvE pHoNeS?
"especially since I can't think of anything from my phone that I would truly like on my desktop"
Wyze doesn't support viewing their cameras on PC without a bunch of fiddling. I downloaded the app and was running within 20 minutes of having the idea. The usability isn't the best, but having it on my desktop is has been a real time saver with a new puppy.
Some apps don't have a good Windows equivalent.
Your Phone / Phone Link still supports this. See: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/topic/setting-up-apps-in....
there are millions of laptops with touchscreens capable of playing Android games, which would be the main use case for WSA.
There are a huge number of phone apps which are not on the desktop and you have to use them on your phone. Tons of banking apps, e.g. Cash App, Venmo etc, are not supported on the Web. Other apps, like TikTok have Web versions which are so broken to the point where they are unusable.
I have to keep a Chromebook to be able to run Android apps on the desktop, unless anyone has another solution?
Your phone is still available and really cool. But it mirrors your phone instead of running the apps on your PC
"Your phone" feature still works. Apps don't run on your PC but are displayed on the PC desktop from your phone. I have a Samsung phone and use this feature dialy.
Well, you're a bit cherry picking here aren't you? Ignoring big success of software like Bluestacks, which is spawning these competitors?
Still exists and still using it but this is not the same as that is just showing the phone's screen and content on your desktop.
This feature still exists and it works. It's partly developed by Samsung, so that's why it works.
Google Play Games[0] is also an Android environment for Windows. Many mobile games look and play better on a big screen.
To deploy this way, developers create a packaged version of their Android app for GPG.
[0] https://play.google.com/googleplaygames
I could see Twitch streamers preferring to run android games on a PC for streaming purposes, especially making use of a wired connection.
But yes, it doesn't seem like a huge use case.
If I ran Windows on my Legion Go, I'd probably be looking into WSA.
Windows is famously crappy on touchscreens. It would be really nice to have something like ChromeOS or Android be the UI for a gaming handheld.
My user case could basically be summed as running apps that I never wanted on my phone in the first place.
WSA wasn't intended for calls or messaging. It was intended to allow developers who had developed apps for the Fire tablets to also provide or sell the apps on Windows.
It was also an alternative way for Android developers to write and test code on Windows. You could edit/deploy faster to WSA than to an Android emulator. And WSA apps are resizable, which is handy for seeing how well your code could handle different Android layouts.
The drawback was that WSA did not have any Google Play services. So no map, no Android push notifications, etc. That could have been addressed if Google wanted to license all of the Play bits.
The moment Androids apps on Windows was released I thought it was useless in my opinion.
I assumed there was a subset of users out there that needed something like this but I thought it was a complete waste of time.
One thing that immediately comes to mind are streaming apps. Most providers don't offer windows apps and the websites don't allow downloads, which is very annoying for laptops/windows tablets.
Duolingo restricts some features to the app only and not the browser. Hinge dating app only provides app and no browser option. I am sure there are other examples of use cases.
There are plenty of applications I would like to run in a completely sandboxed environment separate from the blast radius of my phone. Anything by Facebook would be a given. Chat applications which still do not have a serviceable web interface. Whatever.