The recent news of Microsoft discontinuing WSA may come as a surprise, but what surprised me most was that it took me a minute to recognize the TLA. WSL? That’s one I know. I used WSL and know a lot of other people (developers of course) who do as well. WSA? Never used it. I’ve moved on to a Mac personally, but my wife is still a Windows user. It would come as a total surprise to her that she could run Android apps on her Windows machines. And I bet that is true for upwards of 99% of Windows users.

WSA could continue on for one of two reasons. The main reason would be that it was driving a lot of adoption or usage of Windows. I see no evidence that is the case. The secondary reason would be that it provided its own significant revenue stream. I don’t even know how Microsoft monetized it (i.e., did Amazon give them a cut from its app store?), but low usage and most apps of high interest being free does not suggest any non-trivial level of revenue.

One former PM for WSA put this on the lack of revenue and the absence of support for the Google Play store. Amazon has done a great job of getting apps into its app store over the years, but the reality is that developers who rely on Google Play Services don’t want to re-engineer their apps for relatively low-volume third-party app stores. In other words, it isn’t the lack of the Google Play store that is the problem it is the lack of the proprietary Google services that many apps rely on. This is the same problem that plagued Amazon’s Fire Phone. It is why Amazon’s Fire Tablets are great as entertainment devices, but you probably buy a Samsung Galaxy Tab if you want a more general-purpose Android tablet. It is the same reason Windows Phone struggled. Having 80% of popular apps doesn’t cut it when 80% of users care deeply about something in the 20% of apps that you don’t have. My wife repeatedly asking me if one particular app was available on Windows Phone yet still echoes in my head; a form of PTSD I suppose.

There are two other factors to consider in the lack of interest in WSA. The first is simple, the devices on which it makes the most sense to run Android apps just don’t exist. Thinking about running Android and/or iOS apps on Windows dates back to when Phones and Tablets were still a priority for Microsoft. Neither have been part of the Windows strategy for many years now. Consider the death of WSA as an indication that Microsoft has no intention of another major push to put Windows up against the iPad or to introduce another Windows-based phone. Windows client is about things mostly used with a keyboard and pointing device.

The second factor is Web Apps. On my Macbook I have a couple of iOS apps installed. Just a couple. They are for things that have neither a web version nor a MacOS version. In many other cases I tried the iOS app then discovered turning the website into a Web App provided a much better experience. I use Microsoft Edge on my Mac, and if I can’t tell those Web Apps are actually websites then I imagine that the Windows experience must be a notch better!

The bottom line is that WSA would have been great on my Dell Venue 8 Pro. But that was 2014. In 2024 WSA is a capability with little real purpose except as a weird checkbox.