Windows 11 initial Reactions: It Runs Android Apps

Windows 11 initial Reactions: It Runs Android Apps

Windows XP was great then windows vista was not great but then windows 7 was great then windows 8 with the tiles not great windows 10 great and now windows 11 no pressure Microsoft but this is your chance to break that cycle.

So today we got a windows 11 reveal the newest next version of windows coming as a free upgrade this holiday season to a pc near you now it’s funny a lot of you probably know mesa a mac user most of the time just because I’ve used a lot of macs here at the studio.

That's not actually because of mac so I switched to mac oxford for the most part at work because of mac because of final cut prose I’m perfectly happy to spend time in windows all the time and so watching their unveiling event today.

I actually felt more compelled to react to this windows unveiling than anything they've done over in apple completely in the desktop stuff at the end of the day though it's just an operating system and you're gonna have to run apron it.

So we'll get to the app situation in a minute but there's plenty of interesting stuff now that they're doing here in windows11.

First of all the whole aesthetic is refreshed pretty dramatically so we got this new design that I would describe as very glassy like there's a lot of shininess and transparency and glassy translucent elements things happening through here as much as it's probably cringing to say it kind of does remind me a little bit of the hype around windows vista.

When we had that super flat windows XP and then vista was all this glass but of course now it's much brighter and lighter and I’m just gonna stop mentioning vista nowhere is a new start menu in windows 11 which might make you a little nervous.

If you're familiar with them messing with the start button and the start menu in the past but it’s pretty good it's actually centered now by default to keep with the theme that Windows 11 should be the center of your ecosystem but you can always move it back over tithe left.

If you want but yeah it has the glassy look it also now has suggestions for apps and documents to open that you recently used makes a lot of sense here and then similar to how on android you could swipe over to see a google discover page or on iOS how you could swipe over to see a bunch of widgets with information or even on the mac you could do this on windows 11.

You can swipe overland you get a pane of widgets with information customized by air so it’s this glassy pullover and I assume it'll get better over time as it learns you but it has some level of customization and so you can see things like weather and news stories and social posts all over here and you can fully swipe overdo go full screen with this.

If you want to just live here for a little bit it's pretty cool then here’s an interesting no doubt pandemic inspired feature Microsoft teams are now built into windows natively now okay here's the thing so Microsoft teams I get it it's their communication app they want to use it as much as possible but also uh Microsoft owns skype and they bought skype for 8.5billion dollars.

I think of what Microsoft could do to like make communication easier in windows that's just what came to my head but you know they're trying to promote teams and make it the default messaging app and push it more among regular people so the demos they were showing in this event were just people having chat conversations with friends and family and just hopping on casual video calls and Microsoft teams.

Now I don't know about you but I’ve always thought of teams as a business app like a corporate video conferencing app because that’s the only thing I’ve actually used it for it's literally called teams.

I kind of wonder if building it into windows will actually have the intended effect like it's coming out during the holiday season which is in a couple more months, so again we'll probably want to be mostly done with video calls by then but even for casual video calls like zoom definitely broke through from the enterprise to like being the default video calling app for the world Microsoft, like I said, owns skype but also now FaceTime from this recent iOS update will allow you to send links to people on android phones and web devices and windows users can jump on facetime.

Yeah, I don't know if Microsoft teams are going to be that thing that hard-hitting standard default but we'll see I do love though the new window management controls this is something windows have been ahead on for a while and they're still great at now in windows 11.

You hover over the maximize button I believe and you get all these new multi-window snap presets super dope for people who work with multiple windows open all the time like do and also Joanna stern has an awesome exclusive piece over on the wall street journal right now that posted today you should definitely read it I’ll link it below and in that she mentions there will be a window like memorization basically with external displays.

If you've ever had an external display with a windows laptop in the past it's kind of annoying when you have a bunch of stuff nicely laid out on that monitor and then you unplug it and things all just appear on your laptop not anymore now they will memorize their location on that monitor when you unplug the monitor.

They’ll all minimize and when you plug that monitor back in they’ll all go back to where they were that's pretty dope but the biggest new thing the biggest most headline-worthy new feature from Windows 11 that caught my eye the most has to do with apps so this is the headline ready this is what can be printed up at the top super simply android apps can now run natively in Windows 11 so, right off the bat that is pretty cool they're showing it’s compatible with the window management controls.

It can potentially give you access to a whole new suite of millions of apps that we all know and love working perfectly on the desktop or the laptop or the two in one that you carry whatever runs windows you got to bring the most popular apps to windows to get people to use windows right.

There are some more details behind that super simple headlines this is made possible through collaboration actually between Microsoft and Amazon.

So actually what's going on here sits loading up the amazon app store for android appoint the Microsoft windows app store and this is all going to be run through intel bridge technology so again from Joanna’s piece she notes that you’ll be able to search through the Windows app store like normal and when you find an android app in there and you click to download and install it you will have Tobe signed in to an Amazon account because it's coming from the amazon app store and actually the first time you ever do this it'll have you download and install the amazon app strap for windows.

which it's going to haul it’ll it's just the first time but it'll work and then from there you'll be able to download all these amazon app store aphid’s not a hundred percent overlap with the google play store from my experience it's pretty close but it’s the amazon android app store loaded up into the windows app store that makes senses maybe the headline should really reader android apps that are in the Amazon app store will work natively kind of on windows 11.

You have a Microsoft and amazon account basically it just feels like a super-official sideload it doesn't quite feel native but they'll try to make it feel as sanative as possible the move to do this by the way makes perfect sense like meeting the people where you want them to be with their apps that they already like it’s the same reason you can run android apps on a Chromebook and you can run iOS apps on a mac.

It doesn’t mean they’re going to be good like there's a bunch of bad examples of them not really working great they might suck forenoon-touch input they might just have functions that are broken or just don't work as well when they’re on a computer versus when they're actually on a mobile device so it’s maybe the most convoluted version of it all but at the end of the day, youkan say you offer android apps on windows sure.

So those are all the big new changes the huge bullet points windows 11 is looking fresh and clean with this new aesthetic and I for one am definitely on board with that part it feels modern and there are lots of others behind the scenes and under the hood changes as well I’m surfeit’s 64-bit only for one and there’s also a couple other more interesting new system requirements so there's a compatibility tool that people can use now to check if the pc they currently have will work with windows 11.

But I think we'll learn a lot more as the betas start rolling out and people start using them about graphics improvements and security and privacy and optimizations and all that fun stuff but in the meantime, that's Windows 11. so not bad I’m impressed I think they might have just broken the cycle the on-off I don't want to jinx it but kind of like this update we'll see let me know what you think in the comment section below if you have any strong thoughts on the new design or any of the stuff we’ve talked about here let me know if you also actually care about running android apron windows I’d be super curious.