We already know that today is April Fool’s Day (the equivalent of the Holy Innocents’ Day) but this is no joke. Gustave Monce, famous developer in the Windows environment, has achieved what seemed impossible: install Android on a Lumia 950 XL, which originally worked with the defunct Windows 10 Mobile.
Revive your Lumia 950 XL thanks to Android
In this series of tweets we can see how Gustave shows us how to start the operating system (which shows the Microsoft logo and the Android one) and the part of the configuration that shows the Android version. In this case we have Android S with the March 2021 security patch.
April Fools Deluxe
Take 2 pic.twitter.com/1ienggUiMu
– Gustave Monce (@ gus33000) April 1, 2021
The developer has shared the FFU file via Google drive for those brave who want to give it a try on their Lumia 950 XL. Considering that this is a phone that runs on an officially dead operating system, they don’t have much to lose either.
Monce remembers that the project is still in an early stage and not everything works perfectly. However, it seems that it is fully usable, since both the tactile response and the Bluetooth work perfectly. A major shortcoming is the absence of GPU hardware acceleration, which will inevitably affect the performance of the Android version installed on this Lumia.
Windows 10 Mobile support ended in early 2020. The operating system was released October 2015 and it seems that not even Microsoft itself really believed in its possibilities. Although Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 was an operating system that lagged somewhat behind its competitors, it was always able to take advantage of enviable stability and performance. This was not the case with Windows 10 Mobile, which suffered from a lack of optimization from its inception.
Now it seems that owners of a Lumia 950 XL will be able to try to revive it thanks to Android and the work of Gustave Monce. Who was going to tell us 6 years ago that today we would be at this point? The twists and turns of life…
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