Yesterday on Reddit, user anh0l uploaded an image of Windows 11 on Arm running on his personal Xiaomi Poco X3 smartphone. The smartphone keeps a split partition for the original Android operating system and even has a functioning UEFI.
There are still some major problems with Windows 11 on Arm with this smartphone, though—for example, the right side of the touchscreen has inverted controls, and the temperature range is uncomfortable for a smartphone and its battery, reaching a reported ~48 degrees Celsius (12 degrees Fahrenheit) in testing. There are reports of other Android smartphones reaching those temperature ranges without booting into Windows, which could also be a sign of the times.
Besides those two major issues, though…the experience works smoothly enough to perform some tasks! Redditor anh0l did some limited Blender 3.6 LTS animation, used the operating system smoothly with a Bluetooth mouse, and recognized a 120 Hz display. He even reckoned it should be capable of playing older games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensivewhich ran on an updated version of Valve’s retired Source engine at up to 30 FPS but was not able to handle the more modern Source 2-based Counter-Strike 2 in any playable form.
The only reason most of this seems to work at all is because of how much Windows on Arm development is focused on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips. With these also being commonplace in smartphones, phones with Snapdragon 800 Series or newer CPUs seem to work well for this hack, but older Snapdragons simply won’t. The existence of Snapdragon CPUs with similar underlying architectures on both Windows Arm laptops and Android devices is why this works, and driver support is still far from complete. The high temperature from the Snapdragon 860 inside his Xiaomi Poco X3 running Windows 11 even leads Redditor anh0l to joke that he “won’t go to the airport with this one.”
Despite these issues, he claims the experience “runs flawlessly” and has a few more active screenshots in the thread. Only virtualization-related features, like VM applications or attempting to install the Windows Subsystem of Linux, seem to be completely broken. Otherwise, web browsing and other OS functionality, up to and including those needed to create basic Blender animations, still seem to be present, albeit running at a smooth 120 Hz and a battery-stressing 48 degrees Celsius.
