Tutorial: Get started with the Android Subsystem on Windows 11 — Sideload APKs and even enable Google Play Services

Once these requirements are met, enroll your PC in the Windows Insiders Program either in the Beta or Release Preview channels. Be sure not to opt into the Dev channel as Microsoft is now flighting very early and buggy builds that would form part of the next release of Windows codenamed Nickel (Windows 11's codename is Cobalt).

Once enrolled, you should be seeing a landing page for the Amazon Appstore Preview on the Microsoft Store. If not, just manually search for Amazon Appstore and click on the Install button in the first entry that comes up.

Installing the Amazon Appstore automatically downloads the required binaries for the Windows Subsystem for Android. Once done, open the Amazon Appstore, login with a US-based Amazon account and you should be good to go.

While the Amazon Appstore route is the recommended method by Microsoft, it requires certain criteria such as being enrolled into the Insiders program and having an Amazon US account. For those who would like to test out WSA without having to worry about the aforementioned requirements, there is a workaround possible. 

1. Open a browser and navigate to https://store.rg-adguard.net/. 
2. In the first drop down, select "ProductID". In the text field, enter 9P3395VX91NR and select Slow or RP in the next dropdown and click on the checkmark.
3. Navigate to the last result, which is an MSIXBUNDLE installer for WSA. It should be about 1.2 GB in size. Click on the link to download the file and save it to a location of choice. 
4. Right click on the downloaded MSIXBUNDLE and select Copy as Path.
5. Now, open an elevated PowerShell prompt and type Add-AppPackage -Path <path to MSIXBUNBLE>. Since we've performed Copy as Path before, simply right click after the -Path switch to automatically insert the file path, and press Enter. PowerShell will deploy the MSIXBUNDLE and the Windows Subsystem for Android entry will be available in the Start menu.
6. If you have winget installed, you can reduce many of the above steps by simply typing winget install 9p3395vx91nr -s msstore from an elevated command prompt.

Note that the Amazon Appstore Preview app comes as part of the default WSA package.

Now that we have WSA installed, it's time to have fun with apps. Open the Windows Subsystem for Android entry from the Start menu to access the settings. Here, you can access the Android file system, set WSA resources, and enable Developer Mode. Enabling Developer Mode allows sideloading Android apps via the Android Debug Bridge (ADB).

The Amazon Appstore Preview has a paltry selection of apps for now, but that need not deter you from trying your favorite apps. Using ADB, we can easily sideload Android Packages (APKs) into WSA. The sideloaded APKs behave in the same manner and have access to the same platform features as do ones downloaded via the Amazon Appstore. Here's how you can accomplish this: 

1. Visit the Android SDK Platform Tools release notes page and click on "Download SDK Platform-Tools for Windows".
2. Save the ZIP file to your drive and extract it to an easy location, such as C:\ADBKit, for example.
3. Open the WSA app from the Start menu and enable Developer Mode. This will start the actual WSA hypervisor.
4. Once Developer Mode is enabled, you will see that it allows connecting ADB to the WSA instance via an IP address.
5. Now, open a command prompt and change to the directory where you have unzipped the ADB tools.
6. Connect to the running WSA instance by typing adb connect localhost:58526. It should connect to the WSA instance right away. If for some reason it fails to connect, you can also connect to the IP address mentioned separately in the WSA Settings app. In any case, make sure there is no firewall rule blocking the private network.
7. After the connection is established, you can start sideloading apps. In this example, we will sideload a file transfer app called Sweech that is useful for the next section. 
8. Download the Sweech APK from a reputable APK repository such as APKPure, for example, and save it to the ADB tools directory (in this case, C:\ADBKit). 
9. In the command prompt, execute adb install sweech.apk. ADB will now stream the bits to WSA and install the package. You should now be able to see the app in the Start menu. 
10. Repeat this process for any APK that you would like to sideload. Apps that do not rely on GMS should install and work without issues. Note that you need to connect ADB to WSA only once during a session.

If sideloading each app is not your cup of tea, using third-party app stores such as Aurora or F-Droid may help. Aurora is an excellent repository of free, popular Android apps while F-Droid focuses squarely on open-source ones. Download and sideload the Aurora app store and all subsequent app installs can be directly performed and updated from within Aurora if available in the repository.

An important point to consider here is that, unlike WSL 2 that allows seamless navigation between Linux and Windows filesystems, WSA's filesystem cannot be accessed from within Windows. So, although you can open the Files app from WSA, you cannot drag and drop files or use the file picker UI to import files into WSA. Hopefully, Microsoft will enable this feature in a future WSA update.

For the moment, we can use popular file sharing apps on Android to work our way around this limitation. We have installed Sweech in the earlier step just for this purpose. Of course, you can also try other popular apps such as ShareMe as well.

1. Open the Sweech app that we have installed in the previous section, from the Start menu.
2. Press the big Play button in the middle of the app. This opens a port that allows file transfers. This is similar to how file transfer happens between a PC and an Android phone via Wi-Fi except that the Android phone here is WSA.
3. Open a web browser in Windows and navigate to the IP address shown in Sweech. This will reveal the Android filesystem.
4. To upload a file, just navigate to a folder and press the blue upload icon towards the bottom right edge.
5. Similarly, just click on any file you need to directly initiate a download. 

Note that the free version of Sweech does not use HTTPS, so be sure to turn off file sharing after use.

But Android being Android and Windows being Windows, it is only a matter of time before some enthusiast finds a workaround, and it's here already. Thanks to the efforts of developer ADeltaX on GitHub, it is now possible to install and run GMS, Google Play, and more in WSA. Though it does require a few extra steps, the end result works surprisingly well.

The prerequisites for this procedure include having WSL 2 with any Linux distro of choice installed along with a handy file archiver such as 7-zip. You will also need scripts from ADeltaX's WSAGAScript GitHub repo. In the WSL 2 distro, you will need to install the lzip, unzip, and dos2unix tools.

The entire process is well-detailed in the embedded video below, so we are not reproducing them again. Broadly, the steps include:

1. Removing the app signature from the MSIXBUNDLE that we had downloaded from Adguard
2. Modifying the Android partitions that are part of the WSA image
3. Integrating GApps into the system partition and applying root and SELinux
4. Unmounting and copying the Android partitions back into the WSA install folder
5. Replacing the default kernel with the one from the GitHub repo folder
6. Installing this homebrew WSA via PowerShell

After installing the modified WSA image via PowerShell, the Play Store app should be visible in the Start menu. However, it does not allow signing in to a Google account just yet. As a workaround, enabling sign in requires temporarily disabling SELinux.

1. Go to your ADB folder and connect to the WSA instance by launching a command prompt and using adb connect <IP address>.
2. Access the shell by typing adb shell.
3. Type su to get root access.
4. At the root prompt, enter setenforce 0 to disable SELinux
5. Now you can sign in to the Play Store and setup your account just like how you would do an Android phone.

Now that we are done with the need for a rooted kernel, it is important to replace the rooted kernel with the default one that comes with WSA. Assuming you've followed the video instructions above,

1. Turn off WSA from the WSA Settings app
2. Navigate to the C:\WindowsSubsystemAndroid folder where the WSA package was extracted earlier and enter the Tools directory.
3. Rename the current kernel as kernel_root and rename the original kernel_bak back to kernel. You can reuse the rooted kernel whenever root access is needed.
4. Restart WSA and enjoy the Play Store.

A word of caution, though. Modifying UWP apps outside the sandbox environment presents a security risk, so we recommend not downloading other homebrew WSA packages. Only use this method locally with a legit original package from Microsoft.