From the failure of the Kin phones to the abandonment of the Lumia line and Windows 10 Mobile, the Redmond giant never managed to solve the mobile equation. However, Windows 11 is on the horizon, and its support for the ARM architecture opens up new possibilities. What are some developers doing? Nothing less than installing Windows 11 on an Android phone…
Windows 11 is still making waves. Some manufacturers have already released official drivers for the OS, and the main questions now focus on the release date. A recent Intel support document suggests that Windows 11 will hit shelves in October 2021 (now edited) on new machines, while the rest will have to wait until 2022.
Of course, in the Microsoft universe everything can change overnight, and what is 'unofficial' today could become part of the final design within a few weeks. With that in mind, we come to the 'Renegade' project, which essentially seeks to run everything it can on phones based on the Snapdragon 845 SoC. The Renegade team's latest discovery is that Windows 11 ARM64 gets along relatively well with smartphones that use the Snapdragon 845. That's right: They are installing Windows 11 on Android phones.
Windows 11 on an Android Phone
For now, the experiments are limited to the OnePlus 6T and the Xiaomi Mi 8. The main challenge was creating a custom UEFI environment, since the factory bootloader on those devices cannot boot Windows (and Qualcomm's XBL/ABL modules are impossible to modify). Add to that other limitations, starting with the lack of call support.
This adventure of Windows 11 on an Android phone is not the first of its kind. We've previously seen Windows 11 running on a Raspberry Pi 4, and another developer managed to load the OS on a Lumia 950 XL with calls and messages working correctly. Considering the state in which Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 10 Mobile were left, using Windows 11 to revive abandoned devices would be a very interesting project.
Obviously, Microsoft's current interest in all of this is null. Some hybrid tablets are expected to receive Windows 11 without issues, but the central strategy for smartphones is to offer apps and services compatible with iOS and Android. Even so, it wouldn't be bad if Windows 11 ARM became a sort of 'LineageOS' to rescue old smartphones. Dreaming costs nothing...
Source: Windows Latest
