Microsoft to end its Android apps on Windows 11 subsystem in 2025 (opens in new tab)

WSA was literally the only reason I upgraded to Windows 11. What is going on there at Amazon and Microsoft?

They also dropped support for the Audible app for Windows last year, so now the only way to use it will be through the useless website that blasts it at 100% volume with no control.

Welp, it will have been nice while it lasted!

Thank you, Microsoft, for continually yanking genuinely useful features and shoving shit down our throats that we neither want nor need, but that some marketing grunt figured was the new shiny.

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39606464

WSA seems to be at least partially open source (the Kernel is available), so hopefully there is enough of a community around it to continue development and support. This seems like bad news for the closed source components, though, like the interface.

I really enjoyed playing with WSA and thought it had great potential as a means to run archived mobile games and applications. It was far more seamless than using a development Android emulator, and the state of game-oriented Android emulators is disastrous.