 Microsoft has just released a preview version of Android apps running on Windows 11. Now obviously this didn't make the full release earlier this month, but if you are a beta channel user of Windows 11 you'll need to opt into the Windows Insider program. You can now get access to these Android apps. So you can see I have a couple or a few actually pinned to my start menu here. I'm going to show you how this all works, how you actually get it and just how well these sort of apps run side by side with other Windows apps. So first things first, the first thing you'll need to do is obviously sign up to be a beta insider. If you're not quite sure about that you'll need to check out the Microsoft blogs. They have all the details on how you sign up to that. And what you'll do is you'll find all this stuff in the actual Microsoft store. So you'll search for an Android app in here and then it will basically redirect you over towards the Amazon app store to get those Android apps. And what it installs in the background is something called the Windows Subsystem for Android. So this is very similar to the Linux Subsystem for Windows, which allows obviously you to run Linux distros and Linux apps on top of Windows. What this actual subsystem for Android does is it allows you obviously to run Android apps on Windows 11. Now this is the basic settings interface for this. You get the Android sort of files picker and this will start that up. And as you can see, it's basically starting a virtual machine essentially, which will run Android apps on Windows 11 here. So the most basic thing is there's a files picker. You get sort of access to the images and audio and any documents you might download within these Android apps when you're running them. That's a pretty sort of basic Android feature there. Everything else you can have this running continuously in the background or you can have it spin up as needed. So if you don't want it to reuse a bunch of memory resources in the background, you might want as needed ticked here. Other stuff is like developer mode, pretty basic settings for here. That's really the star of the show is actually the Amazon App Store that comes with this as well. So this is actually how you're going to load on apps into Windows 11, how you're going to run them side by side with other apps. As you can see, this is basically the same as what you would get on a fire device. So an Amazon fire device. Unfortunately at the moment during this preview period, there's only around about 50 apps. So it's pretty limited to what you can actually install. So whereas Minecraft might be available typically on the fire store, if you try and search for it, you're not actually going to find it right now. But there are a bunch of other games. I've installed stuff like the Kindle app. So I'll spin that up now. You can see you get the basic Kindle app that you have on Android. Either way, you can also get access to your library. I don't actually have any books on this account to really show you exactly how that sort of works. But imagine the Kindle app on Android. That's pretty much what you're getting here. What's really, I think, interesting about this integration, though, is the gaming side of things. Obviously, Final Fantasy 15 is available here. I'm going to spin that up and you'll see that starts going. And I'm going to actually open up the task manager and show you just how much memory and sort of CPU resources this uses. Now I'm actually running this on a desktop gaming PC. There's a 3080Ti in here. I also have Intel Core i9 11900K. So a bunch of stuff running. I'm just going to close that real quick and probably try and get that to mute. So we'll mute the stuff. There we go. Let's try this again so it doesn't get too loud. And yeah, so I have an 11900K. So it's probably pretty much the best sort of desktop system unless you have an AMD, obviously, to sort of experience the apps on. I actually ran these on a Surface Pro X earlier and they seem to be running pretty well. So I will be doing a bunch of testing across a bunch of devices. But for now, this is more of like a quick look at what you can sort of expect. So we have an Android game running here Final Fantasy 15. I'm not going to play around too much with it. If you had a touch screen, you're obviously going to get better sort of experience with the Android games. But obviously, Bluestacks has been on Windows for quite some time. So a lot of these Android apps already work quite well on mouse and keyboard. I will spin up another game. Let's go for Game of Kings and that will launch here and load. And you'll notice that it's around about 2GB in my memory right now. So it's slowly starting to creep up if I launch more games side by side, which is obviously kind of understandable since these games are going to take a little bit more than sort of like a Kindle app, you know, just reading books side by side. But you can see it's creeping up to sort of like around about 2.5GB. I think that's probably round about what we were expecting for memory consumption. In terms of like the performance of the apps and like side by side, if I try and snap these, it feels very much like they're just basically Windows apps. I can just sort of snap them to the side and have two of them side by side. I can obviously open up other Windows apps on top of this. And the performance obviously on my processor and my particular system is really solid. We'll obviously have to look at that performance across a variety of devices. But right now this feels very solid for an initial preview. Obviously we can't test out a bunch of different games because they're not quite there yet. This one has just needed to sort of like restart. There's obviously some bugs here and there. I have noticed when you try and resize certain games like Final Fantasy XV, it kind of like basically restarts the game. So whereas on Game of Kings, I don't think it does that. No, so you can sort of, it doesn't really let you resize it, but it doesn't like, you know, try and restart the game. You can resize it smaller, but not too much larger. There you go. I don't think you can get much larger than that. But yeah, it doesn't restart the game like Final Fantasy XV. So it's going to be like a little bit of difference between how some of these Android apps work and that's all depends on how the developers actually created these apps. But yeah, this is a basic real quick look at Android apps on Windows 11 and we're expecting, I mean, I'm hoping that this is going to come to all sort of Windows 11 devices, all supported ones in the coming months. This preview seemed pretty solid so far. We just obviously need to see more apps and sort of how the performance works out. But yeah, that was a real quick look at Android apps running on Windows 11. For more, check out theverge.com and don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel.