[uponcoffee]

There was a story a few weeks back about Microsoft working on a new android subsystem. So truly coming full circle; android OS stability (via project treble), the vm approach instead of compatibility layer approach, and improvements to hardware sharing/passthrough to wsl 2 mean that they can finally realize what they tried to do with Projecy Astoria.

They'll need to manage their own app store as I can't imagine they'll have gapps//shims out of the box, but that works in their favor if they wanted to do another mobile play.

[microtonal]

They'll need to manage their own app store as I can't imagine they'll have gapps//shims out of the box, but that works in their favor if they wanted to do another mobile play.

When the new EU fair market regulation is accepted, they will be able to compete with an app store op Android (or iOS):

allow the installation and effective use of third party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, operating systems of that gatekeeper and allow these software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the core platform services of that gatekeeper.

Since they already allow alternative app stores (e.g. Steam) on regular Windows, not much changes for them in this respect. But they will also be able to compete with the Play Store and iOS App Store with their own store.

Source: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

[temac]

It's already possible to have other app stores than Play Store on Android, even simultanously. I think some features are reserved to Play Store in practice (to stores pre installed on the phone) so there could be some improvement on this point.

[chc]

Google also currently prevents OEMs from installing competitors' stores by threatening to withhold access to Google's services. This is one of the points in Epic's lawsuit.

[dmitrygr]

Um.... Samsung phones come with Samsung store...in usa..and have google services on them just fine...

There is also a web frontend for it: https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/galaxy-store/

[tracker1]

At this point I could see how some developers may prefer an MS store for ios and android devices over the native stores. Especially if they make deeper cuts on pricing (10% of sales instead of 30% and 3% of transactions instead of 30%).

I'm slightly leery about it all, but definitely warming up to MS this past decade. WSL2 and VS Code have made my life much easier to say the least. Of course this is the intended effect, I no longer have the urgency to get into a full Linux environment this way.

On-Topic: glad to see this GWSL thing, as I'd been thinking about doing similar... getting X and pulseaudio working in windows, and configured right in WSL environment is a pain to say the least. If this eases that pain even if only for local logins, I'm pretty happy with it. I spent a couple days trying to get it all working... I could launch Ubuntu's Firefox instance, but couldn't for the life of me get audio working right and just gave up after a couple days.

[jayd16]

>They'll need to manage their own app store as I can't imagine they'll have gapps//shims out of the box, but that works in their favor if they wanted to do another mobile play.

They own App Center so maybe its not that far away.