Run Android On Your Windows PC Using Remix OS (Operating System)
If you’ve ever wondered what Android would look and feel like as a regular desktop operating system, now you can give your imagination a break. Chinese company Jide co-founded by 3 ex-googlers has delivered its promised Remix OS 2.0 for PCs, Macs, and practically anything that runs on an x86 chip, covering both Intel and AMD.
Jide’s Remix OS is a forked version of Android (Remix OS 2.0 is based on Android Lollipop 5.1) that can run on Windows. Jide has retrofitted Android into a form that more closely resembles a traditional desktop. And while it does succeed in that to some extent and definitely does better than other similar attempts, Remix OS for PC is still marked as Alpha and will have a bug or two or more hiding in some corners.
Remix OS itself is quite mature, despite being only at its 2.0 version. Jide has had time to refine the Android desktop experience with the Remix Ultraportable tablet and, more recently, the Remix Mini PC. That said, it’s far from perfect if you will compare it with an OS designed from the ground up for desktops, like Windows or even to some extent Chrome OS. Despite Jide’s best efforts, Remix OS will always be burdened by Android’s limitations, both technical and arbitrary.
What’s new in Remix OS for PC is, well, the PC part. Remix OS was originally designed for ARM devices but it only sounds fair that an Android PC experience should also run on a PC. For this project, Jide partnered with Android-x86, so far the biggest and most successful community port of Android for the x86 platform.
While both Remix OS and Android-x86 have already seen some amount of success, the combination of the two is still, at this point, still too fresh to be considered stable. While Jide is offering the software for free for anyone, it does recommend it more to developers or, at the very least, very adventurous and
One nice thing about Remix OS for PC is that you won’t have to actually install it on a computer to use it. It utilizes an already well known technology in Linux called Live USB, which lets users run an operating system on a USB stick only. Remix OS for PC has two options at boot, a Guest Mode that doesn’t save any changes and a Resident Mode that does. Jide doesn’t state any requirement for PC specs, other than running on an Intel or Mac and has an option to boot from USB, though a decent netbook might suffice. As for the USB stick itself, Jide recommends, one that is formatted to FAT32 and has 8 GB of space and a writing speed of 20 MB/s.
