I tried to emulate some PC apps on Android

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Thanks to improvements in the emulation space, it's finally possible to play your favorite Windows titles on Android phones. Having tested three different x86_64 emulators over the past few months, I can confirm that as long as you have a halfway decent device with a Snapdragon processor, you won't have too much trouble emulating 2D titles and slightly older PC games.



But what about running PC applications on Android devices? Although Mobox, Winlator and other Windows emulators use containers instead of virtual machines, one might wonder if it's possible to run apps on these powerful emulators. Given that most productivity and creativity programs have significantly lower system requirements than 3D games, I decided to tackle this project head-on. The result? After hours of brain-scratching, I barely got a few apps running on my phone. But if you'd like to read more, here's a not-so-short log detailing this failed experiment.



Blender worked surprisingly well in the Mobox container

But I was in for a rude awakening…

Running Blender in Mobox

Since Mobox consistently gave better results than any other Windows emulator I've tried so far, I decided to use it for the first round of testing with my Poco F5. I initially chose Blender as this is the app I've used extensively for 3D modelling and rigging over the past few weeks – and the installation went smoothly! After launching the app, I connected an external keyboard and mouse to transform the default cube into a hideous modeling mess.


Aside from my lack of artistic skill, the interface was quite responsive, even when I used most of the tools in edit mode and added a number of modifiers to the cube. However, I didn't dare to use the performance-intensive aspects of Blender. After the very first app exceeded 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 could not be installed on Mobox

While the rest didn’t even boot up


The Adobe Creative Cloud installer popped up in Task Manager for a few seconds before disappearing – and the same issue occurred when installing the Epic Game Store. Meanwhile, the Affinity Photo installer claimed I needed to set up Wine Gecko, which in turn froze about halfway through the installation sequence. VS Studio Code, Inkscape, Greenshot, and most web browsers fared no better. On the other hand, Anaconda and Scribus never got past the extraction phase, even after the installer had been running for 30 minutes.

Install GIMP in Mobox

GIMP cannot be started in Mobox


Although I was able to install Gimp, LibreOffice, WPS Office, OBS Studio, OpenToonZ and a few other apps, they all refused to boot after I closed their respective installation wizards. Just to satisfy my curiosity, I tried running HWiNFO, which failed to identify my CPU or GPU and showed incorrect memory metrics. In the end, Notepad++ remained the only app that worked well on Mobox besides Blender.

Winlator was slightly better than Mobox

The key word here is light


Since Mobox was a colossal failure, I turned to Winlator 7.1 in a last-ditch effort to save this project. Although it is less optimized for gaming than Mobox, I was able to install WPSOffice, Lightworks, VS Studio Code and Scribus, as well as a few other apps, on a Winlator container.

Also, most of these apps were able to launch without crashing, although I was now dealing with slowdowns and glitches. WPS Studio had this weird bug where I couldn't create or open a single document without half the screen going black. Lightworks and VS Studio Code were also completely unusable due to this weird black screen bug. We'd spend all day here if I went through the issues with each app, so let's just say that out of nearly 25 applications, only Gimp, Scribus, AutoHotkey (which was mostly useless here), and Notepad++ ran well on Winlator, so I had to consider this experiment a failure.


Should you try running apps in PC emulators?

How to install Winlator on an Android phone

With most of my crazy experiments, be it turning a RISC-V machine into a NAS or running an operating system from RAM, there are some scenarios where you might want to replicate it on your computer setup. But not this time!

Sure, you can use it to view 3D models in Blender or edit a file or two in Scribus, but without the right keyboard and mouse configuration, you'll have a hard time getting to grips with the touchscreen display. At this point, you could also stream the apps from another PC using Parsec or Sunshine + Moonlight.


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