At first glance, Android 13 does not appear to be a significant upgrade over Android 12. It adds a new Wi-Fi permission, a secure photo picker, and themed icons, but the most notable addition is the ability to run Windows 11 on a virtual machine.
Danny Lin, an Android app developer, shared the news in a tweet that showed 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.
Lin claims that Windows 11 is simple to use despite the fact that it does not support hardware GPU acceleration. The developer even posted a video of the Google Pixel 6 running Doom on the Windows 11 virtual machine.
The best part is that Android 13 is not limited to Windows 11. In addition, the developer demonstrated a few Linux distributions booting up on the device.
Google has enabled this through the use of a new virtualization framework that runs on Android 13. Mishaal Rahman, the editor in chief of XDA Developer, has written extensively about this on his blog, but the short answer is that Google is working hard to improve its virtualization framework, which will eventually run across a wide range of Android devices.
This means that the ability to run other operating systems on Android will no longer be limited to Pixel phones. But don’t place your bets just yet, as Android 13 won’t be available until the end of the year and will only be available to non-Pixel phones next year.
To read our blog on “Android apps, Taskbar improvements, and more are included in the latest Windows 11 update,” click here.
