WoA on Android. Could it work?

Question

This is just a question that I've been asking myself recently. Can you actually deploy Windows on ARM (WoA) to an Android device and actually get it working? I've heard that WoA can also work on Qualcomm SnapDragon processors, isn't that what most Android phones run? I'm pretty sure what I said is mostly true. If this is able to work, can anybody at least roughly or theoretically explain how this would work?

Answer 1

In theory - but there's a bunch of "moving parts" that would need to get sorted out.

Practically - the reason you can throw an arbitrary OS on an intel platform is that they run a standard platform consisting of mostly well understood components. You have standard BIOS or UEFI bootloaders that work in a predictable way, and the same is true of the hardware components. Even then OS vendors, even FOSS ones often need to do work to support a family of processors and other component.

The port of Windows on ARM might give an example of what's needed. Amusingly the credits give an example of what's needed

• you need a bootloader. Android refers to this as "recovery", and you might need to create a shim. Windows uses UEFI these days (bios is x86 only).

• you need a board support package. Many android ports and single port computer linux build simply build around an existing one. In the case of windows you can't leverage existing linux BSPs. That's the tricky part

  • Drivers, which you might be able to get off 'similar' ARM hardware, but need to get ported to arm

  • ARM has different variants with different quirks - its not necessarily likely your phone would have a architecture that WOA could be ported to

So practically you need to somehow either find systems with similar architectures or hardware and bodge together the moving parts to get it to work.

Answer 2

Already done. Go check NTauthority's twitter account where he ran modern warfare on a oneplus 6t. Also WoA for lumia 950 has been on for around a year. Also, WoA deployer for pi3/3b+