But as a proud total nerd, let me fill you in on what this practically invisible layer of Android does, in as simple and human-sounding terms as possible. Google Play Services isn't exactly a household name - at least, not among the non-developers and non-total-nerds among us. And chief among those pieces is a hefty little helper called Google Play Services. It's lacking key parts of the Android experience that are available exclusively on devices running Google's Android setup. The Amazon Appstore, y'see, isn't an apples-to-apples equivalent of the Google Play Store. The three troubling wordsĪll of that gets at the underlying issue with this arrangement - and brings us to the three words that may doom this entire Android-apps-on-Windows enterprise: Google Play Services. Lots of titles are numerous versions behind their up-to-date Play Store counterparts, and plenty of programs you encounter in the Amazon environment clearly haven't been touched in years. Bueller? Bueller? The list goes on and on.Īnd across the board, the apps that are present in the Amazon Appstore are often as good as abandoned. Worse yet, the now- Amazon-owned Eero system for enhanced internet access (hello, home office!) isn't even available in the Amazon Appstore setup. Core titles such as Outlook, OneNote, and the all-in-one Office combo are present, but other offerings - including the standalone Word, Excel, and PowerPoint programs as well as Microsoft Authenticator, Microsoft To-Do, and Microsoft SharePoint - are nowhere to be found. Heck, even Microsoft's own apps are relatively scarce in the Amazon app market.
You certainly won't find most of the efficiency-boosting power tools we talk about so often in these quarters - not even the relatively basic and mainstream ones like IFTTT and Hue.
You won't find password management services like LastPass, 1Password, and Bitwarden.
You won't find any Google-made apps there, of course, but beyond that, you also won't find big-name business appliances like Slack, Trello, or Asana.
The Place You Go for Android Apps Only If You Have Absolutely No Other Option Available™ (the unofficial tagline of the Amazon storefront).Īmazon's Appstore presents plenty of practical problems - chief among them the fact that its virtual shelves are relatively barren compared to the actual Play Store, particularly when it comes to popular productivity tools. Instead, they'll rely upon Amazon's Appstore, a.k.a.
Now, what you might notice in that image leads us to the big honkin' asterisk with all of this: The Android apps on Windows 11 aren't coming from Google, exactly - not from the Play Store app market you're accustomed to interacting with on your actual Android device. When Windows 11 ships later this year, its new and improved Microsoft Store will feature a section of Android apps - sittin' pretty and waiting to be installed, right alongside the regular Word, Excel, and even Minecraft EXE files. And despite all the drippy leaks puddling up around the new Windows announcement, no one seemed to sense that this platform-defying, mind-blowing move might actually happen right now.īut oh, it be happenin', all right. But still, it was a mere hypothetical at that point.
Who woulda thunk?Īll right, so technically, we'd heard about this possibility before - way back in December of 2020 (which I'm pretty sure was at least 140 years ago). Microsoft caught us all by surprise last week when it revealed that the upcoming Windows 11 operating system would support - drumroll, please - Android apps. Let me back up a second, for anyone who isn't magically inside my brain and aware of what I'm thinking. Holy hell freezing over, Batman! Worlds are colliding and wild things are happening here in the land o' Googley tech, but before you get your knickers in a knot with excitement, there's a quick reality check we need to consider.