I tried emulating some PC apps on Android – here’s how it went

Thanks to improvements in the emulation sector, it’s finally possible to play your favorite Windows titles on Android phones. Having tested three different x86_64 emulators over the last few months, I can confirm that as long as you have a semi-decent device powered by a Snapdragon processor, you won’t have too many issues emulating 2D titles and slightly old PC games.

But what about running PC applications on Android devices? Although Mobox, Winlator, and other Windows emulators use containers rather than virtual machines, one might wonder if it’s possible to run apps on these powerful emulators. Considering how most productivity and creativity-oriented software has significantly lower system requirements than 3D games, I decided to tackle this project head-on. The result? After hours of bashing my head against a wall, I barely got a few apps running on my phone. But if you want to read more, here’s a not-so-short log detailing this failure of an experiment.

Blender worked surprisingly well inside the Mobox container

But I was in for a rude awakening…

Since Mobox provided consistently superior results than all other Windows emulators I’ve tried so far, I decided to use it with my Poco F5 for the initial round of tests. I went with Blender first, as that’s the app I’ve used extensively over the past few weeks for 3D modeling and rigging – and the installation went by without a hitch! After booting the app, I connected an external keyboard and mouse to turn the default cube into an abominable mess of a model.

My lack of artistic skills aside, the UI was fairly responsive even when using most of the tools in the Edit mode and adding a bunch of modifiers to the cube, though I didn’t dare to touch any of the performance-heavy aspects of Blender. With the very first app exceeding my expectations, I had high hopes for the rest of the applications – and these were slowly dashed over the course of a few hours.

Half of the apps failed to install on Mobox

While the rest didn’t even boot up

The installer for Adobe’s Creative Cloud would show up inside the Task Manager for a few seconds before disappearing – and the same issue occurred when installing the Epic Game Store. Meanwhile, Affinity Photo’s installer claimed that I needed to set up Wine Gecko, which, in turn, would freeze around the halfway mark of the installation sequence. VS Studio Code, Inkscape, Greenshot, and most web browsers didn’t fare any better, either. On the other hand, Anaconda and Scribus never progressed past the extraction stage even after 30 minutes of running the installer.

GIMP fails to boot in Mobox

Although I was able to install Gimp, LibreOffice, WPS Office, OBS Studio, OpenToonZ, and a few other apps, all of them refused to boot once I closed their respective installation wizards. Just to satisfy my curiosity, I tried running HWiNFO, which couldn’t identify my CPU or GPU and displayed incorrect memory metrics. In the end, Notepad++ remained the only app besides Blender that worked well on Mobox.

Winlator was slightly better than Mobox

The keyword here is slightly

With Mobox being a colossal failure, I turned my attention to Winlator 7.1 in a last attempt to salvage this project. While it’s less optimized for gaming than Mobox, I was able to install WPSOffice, Lightworks, VS Studio Code, and Scribus, alongside a couple of other apps on a Winlator container.

What’s more, most of these apps were able to boot without crashes, though I now had to deal with slowdowns and glitches. WPS Studio had this weird bug where I couldn’t create or open a single document without half the screen turning black. Lightworks and VS Studio Code were also completely unusable due to this weird black screen glitch. We’d be here all day if I went over the issues with each app, so let’s just say that out of nearly twenty-five applications, only Gimp, Scribus, AutoHotkey (which was mostly useless here), and Notepad++ ran well on Winlator, forcing me to deem this experiment a failure.

Should you try running apps inside PC emulators?

In most of my wacky experiments, be it turning a RISC-V machine into a NAS or running an OS from RAM, there are a couple of scenarios where you might want to replicate them on your computing setup. But not this time!

Sure, you can use it to view 3D models inside Blender or edit a file or two inside Scribus, but without a proper keyboard and mouse setup, you’ll have a hard time with just the touchscreen display. At that point, you might well resort to streaming the apps from another PC using Parsec or Sunshine + Moonlight.