Windows Software Coming To Android Via Wine

A reader sends this quote from ZDNet: "Software that allows Windows apps to run on Android devices was demoed at the Fosdem 2013 open source conference this weekend. The demo by Alexandre Julliard, one of the original developers of Wine, showed Wine running on an emulated Android environment. Phoronix reports the performance of Wine on Android to be 'horrendously slow' but says these problems were attributed to it running on an emulated environment rather than a native Android OS. ... The makers claim it bypasses many performance and memory penalties of other methods for simulating computing environments, such as running virtual machines, by translating Windows API calls into POSIX calls on the fly. The Android OS predominantly runs on ARM-based devices today, and a separate demo at the Fosdem conference showed Wine running on ARM-based hardware. There was no news on when support for ARM-based devices or Android will be added to a publicly available Wine release."

Not for users

[paugq]

I'd say Wine on Android is not intended for the end user but for developers. It's not about running Windows x86 applications on Android but about porting Windows applications to Andoroid:

1. As the developer of a Windows application in C/C++, I'll take the source code of my application
2. I'll take the Wine SDK for Android (which does not really exist yet, but wait and see, wait and see!)
3. I'll compile the source code of my application using the Wine SDK for Android. Briefly explained, what this does is use winelib + bionic instead of bionic only.
4. Result is I get a native Android application with a reduced effort

I will of course need to take care about the UI, especially if my application uses Metro-styled custom widgets: those do not fit in Android, but it's a matter of porting the UI of that speficic widget.

So in summary Wine on Android looks more like a cross-platform library (such as Qt or Mono) that implements the Win32 API instead of some other API.

Windows RT apps on Android? I doubt it. Both of them are supposed to be ARM but "ARM" does not really mean anything: there are far too many variations of ARM, even amongst same-generation processors.

Re:Ah, more viruses

[silviuc]

1) You clearly have no idea how Wine works
2) Please provide a list of incidents where Wine helped to proliferate Windows viruses on Linux or Unix machines