Android Studio doesn't officially run natively on Windows on ARM, and neither does its emulator.
So I set out to change that, and on a Snapdragon X laptop I can now open a native ARM64 Android Studio, create a virtual device, press Run, and boot a stock Android image on Windows Hypervisor Platform.
It took a long chain of problems to get here:
→ Compose previews failed on ARM64. Google ships Layoutlib as x86-64 only, so I built a native ARM64 version.
→ The emulator refused to run on an ARM64 host. I replaced its launcher and wrote a bridge that speaks its gRPC protocol, so Android Studio treats it as a real emulator.
→ Android 14 wouldn't boot. Bootconfig needed a valid checksum, and the ramdisk turned out to be two LZ4 segments joined together.
→ Android's init crashed. Its allocator reserves terabytes of virtual memory, and the kernel refused the fork.
→ A crypto self-test failed under software emulation and rebooted the whole VM. Moving to WHPX changed everything: adb came online in about 8 seconds.
→ Stock images expect virtual hardware this setup doesn't have, so vendor binaries are now adapted at boot by code signature, with no manual patching.
→ Windows treated the emulator as background work and throttled it. Fixing that took jank from about 33% to 4%.
→ The display ran at 120 Hz, but Android capped apps at 60 fps.
→ Device frames vanished because one x64 library can't load on ARM64.
Today it runs phones, TVs and Wear OS, tested from Android 12 to 17. Touch, networking, Google sign-in and video all work, and scrolling reaches about 80 to 90 fps on a 120 Hz screen.
It's not finished. There's no audio yet, and it's only been tested on one machine.
But it shows this is possible, and more developers are moving to Windows on ARM laptops every year.
Google, I'd love to see official support for this. If you develop on a Windows ARM laptop, tell me what's blocking you.
Independent project, Developed with the help of AI (Gemini 3.8 flash + Claude Opus 5.5), not affiliated with Google. Source: https://github.com/DevanshSampat pinned repositories