The ARM version will have to wait to get Wine

Oct 5, 2015 18:53 GMT  ·  By

The CEO of CodeWeavers, the makers of Wine and CrossOver, has revealed that Wine is coming to Android, but it's not clear how they will be able to monetize that.

Wine is a widely used application on Linux and Mac OS X systems that has a very clear function: help people run Windows applications on those platforms. Now, Codeweavers, the company that produces Wine and CrossOver, is very close to releasing a new version for Android that would enable them to run Windows apps. This is a really cool idea, and the fact that it's almost ready for launch is great news.

The problem is that CodeWeavers is having trouble figuring out how it will be able to monetize this. It might seem like a great idea, but at the end of the day, you have a Windows apps running on an Android system with not mouse or keyboard. There is probably a market, but it's not an obvious one.

Here comes the caveat. Wine is coming to Android, but not for ARM processors, only for the Android that's using Intel processors. The limitations of the ARM processor are many, and it looks like the performance hit was too much of an obstacle for the Wine developers to overcome. That's not to say that it won't happen, just that it won't happen anytime soon.