On the surface, Android 13 does not appear to be a significant upgrade over Android 12. It has a new Wi-Fi permission, a secure photo picker, and customised icons, but the option to run Windows 11 in a virtual machine is a standout feature.
Danny Lin, an Android app developer, tweeted the news, along with a photo of a Google Pixel 6 running Windows 11 in a virtual machine. Android 13 Developer Preview 1 was installed on the phone.
Take a look at the images below to get a better idea of what I’m talking about.
And here's Windows 11 as a VM on Pixel 6 https://t.co/0557SfeJtN pic.twitter.com/v7OIcWC3Ab
— kdrag0n (@kdrag0n) February 13, 2022Advertisement
Despite the lack of hardware GPU acceleration, Lin claims that Windows 11 is simple to use. Even a video of the Google Pixel 6 running Doom on the Windows 11 VM was given by the developer.
Worked on performance a bit and the Windows VM is actually really usable now, though there's still no graphics acceleration. CPU, I/O, and memory pressure are much better now. pic.twitter.com/it036Gx5Gt
— kdrag0n (@kdrag0n) February 14, 2022
The nice aspect is that Android 13 isn’t limited to Windows 11. The developer also demonstrated how to load up a couple Linux variants on the gadget.
With a new virtualization framework that runs on Android 13, Google has made this possible. Mishaal Rahman, the editor in chief of XDA Developers, has gone into great detail about this on his blog, but the short answer is that Google is working hard to improve its virtualization architecture, which will eventually run on a range of Android devices.
This indicates that other operating systems will be able to operate on Android in addition to Pixel phones.