The next version of Your Phone will offer an easy way to run Android apps in Windows, but an emulator remains a good alternative
Android is overwhelmingly the most popular mobile operating system on the planet, with well in excess of 2.5 billion active devices running a version of Google’s software. Microsoft holds a similar status in the desktop world, with Windows 10 surpassing 1 billion devices in 2020. It’s inevitable that you’ll be sharing data between these two platforms, be it through cloud storage services, web-based file transfer or direct USB connection. But what about sharing software? If there’s an app on your phone that you love, the web-based version is unlikely to be quite as good. Why wouldn’t you want to run the app on your PC instead? What if you want to do it the other way round, running Windows software on your Android device. The good news is that both of these can be done. In an official blog post on 5 August 2020, Microsoft announced that its Your Phone companion app will soon be able to natively run Android apps. The new feature is available to testers initially, but a full rollout is expected in the coming months. The news was revealed as part of a wide-ranging partnership with Samsung, but the feature is expected to become available to all Android handsets that currently support the Your Phone app. The process for linking your phone to the app is detailed in our guide to using Your Phone on Windows 10. However, it’s even more simple if you have a Samsung phone running One UI 2, as you simply need to have both devices connected to the same Wi-Fi network and activate the ‘Link to Windows’ option in quick settings. Once connected, there will be an additional tab called ‘Apps’, in addition to the current Notifications, Messages, Photos, Phone Screen and Calls options. Prior to the announcement on 5 August 2020, the most effective way of running Android apps on Windows was via an emulator. This is a program that is able to imitate software from one platform and make it usable on another. It has been commonly used to run Android games and other apps on desktop, with BlueStacks the most popular.
