
AMD deal brings Android apps to Windows 8 - HarveyKandola
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19756734
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Osiris
I downloaded and installed the application yesterday and got caught playing
some silly tower defense game for an hour when I should have been working.

From the time I was playing around with it, it seems to work really well. I
didn't notice any weirdness with the applications. They provide their own
"store", so my guess is that they've vetted certain apps to make sure they
work properly.

Once thing that I did notice is that the application is using the default
program icon from Visual Studio (the one with the three colored boxes). All
that work and they can't put in their own application icon?

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pjmlp
What all these announcements forget to mention, is that they only work with
DalvikVM pure applications.

NDK based applicatons need to be recompiled, as any native code language
making use of it. So forget about most games.

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fidotron
They don't mention it because they do handle NDK games.

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pjmlp
How do you know that?

How are they handling NDK games that were only compiled for ARM cpus?

Do they JIT translate assembly code, like Sun used to do in the 90's in their
SPARC stations?

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dschuler
The very first releases of the NDK only supported ARMv6, but now it also
supports ARMv7, x86, and MIPS. I actually compile my code for all 4
architectures, and end up with .so binaries in my APK:

lib/armeabi/libpuddle_drops.so

lib/armeabi-v7a/libpuddle_drops.so

lib/mips/libpuddle_drops.so

lib/x86/libpuddle_drops.so

This really takes no effort on my part, except to specify APP_ABI := all in
one of the build files.

The system where the app is installed picks the preferred (or compatible)
library automatically, which usually means ARMv7 with a fall-back to ARMv6 on
low-end phones.

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codedivine
Yes, same with my NDK based apps though in my case I have only compiled for
x86 and ARMv7-A. About MIPS, is there any MIPS based hardware with Play store
access out there that we need to worry about?

Btw you may want to know that there is a bug in 4.0.3 that sometimes loads
armeabi code instead of armv7-a code on some ARMv7 systems like HTC One S.

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dschuler
I haven't seen any MIPS-based devices yet, but I also added x86 support before
I saw any evidence that it was needed at the time. I try to make the app as
widely compatible as possible without creating undue work for myself.

I did not know about that bug, but thanks for telling me! I have had a few
reports of the app running slowly on the One S, which didn't make sense at the
time. I'm not sure if only supplying the ARMv7 code would cause the device to
pick the correct library, or just exclude a lot of (half decent) ARMv6 devices
I'd still like to support for now.

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mtgx
Why do all these articles only mention Windows 8? I believe AMD said it works
on Windows 7, too. Does it make the headline more compelling if it just says
Windows 8?

Also, I imagine that if this is happening, most developers who already have an
Android app won't bother to create a Windows 8 one, too.

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lnanek2
I never found BlueStacks very compelling on my desktop or laptop. Tablets or
NetBooks might make it more than a fun tech demo, though. Windows 8 is trying
to cover more of those, especially the WinRT version.

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electrichead
Would the apps be able to run as background processes? It's a really good move
by AMD. One that RIM probably should have at least considered (I couldn't
resist bringing them up)

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bryanlarsen
As far as I'm aware BB10 is compatible with a large subset of Android
applications.

~~~
robotnixon
This is somewhat true. An Android app won't install and run on BB10 but
developers can repackage an Android app fairly easily and offer it in the BB
store.

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manojlds
Is the implication that Bluestack won't work on Intel chips, if only at a
lesser efficiency?

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Scene_Cast2
It looks like AMD is just putting a pretty wrapper around Bluestacks and
shipping that. The wrapper is possibly going to be limited to AMD / Win8
systems, but Bluestacks certainly isn't.

