Windows Subsystem for Android™

Tips and Tricks

July 2022

It has been exciting to see feedback on the Windows Subsystem for Android™, the core engine behind Mobile Apps on Windows since we first made it available to our Windows Insiders audience last October. While we obviously appreciate the words of encouragement, we also value the suggestions on how we can do better. We’ve been able to act on some of this feedback to make WSA a better product, and we’ll continue to use that feedback to prioritize new features and improvements in the future.

Today we’d like to share more about some of the lesser-known features of WSA, as we believe these are useful tools for users of the product to understand.

Full Screen apps

One of the top pieces of feedback we received when WSA was released last fall was to allow apps to go into “Full Screen Mode”, meaning get rid of the titlebar and taskbar giving users a more immersive experience. We listened, and we have since added that feature. When running an application inside WSA, you can use F11 to toggle it into/out of full screen mode.

Horizontal swipes

We’ve done work to translate mouse scroll wheel events into up and down swipes. If you hold down the Shift key and use the scroll wheel, we’re able to translate that into horizontal swipes. Note, this is also how you can perform horizontal scrolling in native Windows applications.

Two Finger swipes

We’ve seen that some applications want users to use fingers to perform actions in the app. To simulate that in WSA, if you hold down the ALT button, and then click and drag with the mouse, we’ll send two finger touches and swipes to the application.

Gamepad support

Since WSA came out last October, you can use with apps that support gamepad. A couple of our favorites to play with the gamepad include:

Hungry Shark Evolution

Talking Tom Hero Dash

Thank you for all your support with WSA. Please continue to file feedback via the Feedback Hub with any issues or suggestions you might have. Together we can all make this a better product.

Thanks,

– The WSA Team