Many people have tried Parallels Desktop and Microsoft Remote Desktop to run applications on their own PC. This is the easy way, but you need an online connection.
What about using a Chromebook or Android phone when you’re offline or don’t want to rely on another PC or server to run your local applications? The Samsung Dex, by the way, is an example of using your phone as a desktop PC with a portable monitor. More and more people want to use their own mobile phone as a mobile PC by simply attaching an external monitor (e.g. https://dopesplay.com).
And no, don’t tell me to rewrite the app to compile it with Xojo for Android. That takes too much time (=money).
Has anyone experienced this scenario?
What is the best way to get Xojo Mac or Windows (x86 or ARM) apps to run on Android systems?
Happy weekend to all
I suspect that a phone wouldn’t have enough memory to run Android, a cpu level emulator, an operating system and an application. Memory would likely be the biggest issue.
My android mobile phone of 2021 and the latest of 2024 has 12 gb ram , more than the 8 gb that’s standard for desktop pc
This theoretically can be done, but the complexities are so numerous it’s staggering.
As a developer, I would never support this kind of configuration, because there’s no way of telling if issues are due to your code, the framework, the emulation layer, the specific Android model, or anything in between.
Your users will also need a tremendous amount of technical ability to set this up. As far as I know, there’s really no turnkey method of just packaging an emulated app as an apk.
A few years ago, just for lulz, I ran WinXP in an emulator on my Android tablet. It did NOT run well and took about 10 minutes just to boot. It crashed constantly. It drained the battery in less than an hour. Of course running a whole OS is obviously different than emulating a single application, but performance will undoubtedly suffer, and I suspect there are many things that just won’t work. Even running Win32 apps via WINE on my M2 Mac Studio has a pretty stiff performance penalty, I can’t imagine on a lower-end Android phone.
In short, from a developer’s perspective, I think it’s not a great solution. If it’s something just for your personal use, then it would certainly make for an interesting project, but there are more specialized emulation forums where you would probably have better luck getting answers on how to get it working and what kinds of operations may or may not be emulatable. Unfortunately you’re going to spend a great deal of time getting it working either way, and personally I’d rather put that time into writing it as a native android app.
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Thank you Christian for sharing your experience. Fortunately the arm processors and emulators did very big steps last 2-3 years, not to mention GPU capabilities.
So I was also wondering if somebody tried Wine with Xojo builds because it’s not an emulator and depends from API calls made by Xojo builds.
There are very important features of Christian’s plugins that simply missing on Android. My app needs also third party apps that will never exist on Android.
Anybody tested windows ARM builds with Wine or Mac Apps with Limbo?
Better a Mac emulator o Windows emulator on Android?
This.
When you are doing things for yourself, ok. For others, never.
VMs are kind of reliable but slow, emulators are unreliable, they always fail at some point.
No users will want this as a target platform (unless it is a game, and the purpose of such emulator is running lots of games). Go native, or don’t go.
I can understand you, but I really wanted only to hear about experiences.
If it’s etically or practically correct or not is out of the topic, it’s an other thread.
You are reading about experience on the subject. But let’s keep your quest going on. 