Run Windows 11 on your Android 13 right now
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Key notes
- Users could soon be able to run Windows 11 on their Android devices.
- Google is currently working on a plan to integrate the OS and Android 13 which will require a little bit of tweaking.
- Virtual Machines will be the first to test out this new feature to see how it performs.
Google’s app ecosystem has always been an interesting topic. A lot of companies have developed apps for Android, but getting them onto the platform has sometimes been hard. Some companies have succeeded; others haven’t.
As a result, we’ve seen some fragmentation between devices with different versions of the OS.
Why would Google do this? It turns out you can get a lot more computing power from much less code. And virtualized systems tend to be better in many ways.
Android 13 on top of it
Android 13 is designed to address that fragmentation. You’ll start seeing it in your apps soon enough: Apps using Android 13 will run on any device with an OS 13 or later version installed.
Virtual machines are incredibly useful, but they’re also surprisingly brittle. They require hypervisor software, which is both complex and not very well documented.
It’s not exactly like Windows 11, but it is pretty close. You can boot into Windows and install things pretty much like you would on Windows 11.
There are many tweaks necessary to get it working perfectly, but once you have all of these things in place, you can run Windows 11 right on your Google Pixel 6 without any other software.
To make the virtual machine running on the Pixel 6, Google is using a similar system to their Chromebooks. It’s based on the same “pKVM” technology that has its roots in mainstream virtualization projects like Xen, KVM and VMWare.
Security will be an issue
Google has not yet revealed whether it is giving virtual machines full access to Android devices, but the threat of malware and other third-party apps that target Google’s operating system is a concern for many.
This brings us back to the bigger issue of security. The fact that you are running Windows 11 on an Android phone may not be the most secure solution, but there are ways to make it more secure.
Google’s microdroid is a curious thing. It’s really a stripped-down version of Android, but it isn’t supposed to be used in apps that aren’t compiled on the phone itself. And Google doesn’t say what components of the operating system will be given microdroid treatment.
One of the things the ChromeOS operating system does very well is boot. It’s a good piece of software, and it works well on Chromebooks. Google’s next step could be to allow running Windows in some basic way on Chromebooks, even if it can’t run full-blown Windows itself.
As of now, the details are still a bit vague but it looks promising so far.
Would you try Windows 11 on an Android device once available? Let us know in the comment section below.
