WINE for Linux Going Mobile, Soon You Can Run Windows Apps on Android

Don’t you think it would be great if you would run Windows apps on your Android devices – mobiles and tablets? Of course, nobody wants a BSOD on their phone now but nonetheless this may be a reality soon.

WINE for Linux has existed for quite some time now but they are soon going mobile. If you didn’t know then WINE is basically an open source application that allows applications designed for Windows to run on Unix operating systems such as Linux (there are also ports to OS X, FreeBSD, and Solaris). The project features the software library Winelib, against which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Linux.

The name WINE was an acronym for WINdows Emulator. Its meaning later shifted to the recursive backronym, Wine Is Not an Emulator in order to differentiate the software from other emulators.

The Wine software is being ported to Google’s mobile operating system by Alexandre Julliard, the original developer behind the project. Julliard, who is employed by CodeWeavers to work on Wine, briefly showed off Wine on Android on Sunday in Brussels.

According to a report from Phoronix, performance was horrendously slow, but this was simply because Wine was running on an emulated Android environment, rather than on an actual device: “Julliard uses an Apple MacBook for development of his software that runs on Linux to run Windows software… Android was emulated for his demo.”

Anyways, it is a good start. We’ll definitely keep an eye on this project and follow up with updates.

Credits: TNW