Windows on Arm users now spend 90% of time in native apps, says Arm

[zohaibahd]

Why it matters: Windows on Arm may have finally hit its stride. Arm recently announced that users on the platform now spend more than 90% of their time using native applications. This bump marks a significant milestone, suggesting that historical concerns over app compatibility may be becoming less of a problem.

Concerns about app compatibility have long held back the adoption of Arm-based Windows PCs. Since the launch of Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ devices last year, Arm says developer support has improved. More than 100 popular Windows applications now have native Arm versions.

This support covers most essential tools. All major web browsers, including Google Chrome, now run natively. The Arm-native Chrome delivers a clear performance boost, running over three times faster than its emulated x86 version in Speedometer 3.0 benchmarks.

The growing native-app ecosystem also includes messaging software like Slack and WhatsApp, creative tools such as Adobe Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve, and popular entertainment apps like Spotify. The performance benefits are clear even for specialized software. The blog post highlights that the developers of the AI tool Pieces saw on-device AI response times improve by 64 percent on Arm hardware.

The company is optimistic, saying the user experience on its platform is no longer a question of compatibility but rather one of unlocking superior performance, longer battery life, and smarter features. However, Arm's optimism hasn't made a significant impact on sales.

A report from last year showed that consumers only purchased 720,000 Snapdragon X laptops in Q3 2024, which makes up less than one percent of the entire PC market. This problem is not exclusive to Arm. Intel admitted that its own AI PC chip sales have fallen well short of expectations.

Some compatibility gaps also remain, particularly with parts of the Adobe Creative Suite. However, this list is shrinking, and recent improvements to the x86 emulation layer ensure that even most non-native apps still run well. All that remains is better gaming support. Microsoft has let gaming on Arm stagnate. Valve has put forth some effort to improve playability on the architecture, but it has primarily focused on Linux.

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Windows on Arm users now spend 90% of time in native apps, says Arm

 

[Dreadcthulhu]

I would guess there is some major selection bias going on here - if you needed to use apps that don't have an ARM version a lot, well you probably wouldn't have purchased a Snapdragon laptop in the first place.

 

[NumberNine]

Maybe acceptable for the most basic of mainstream computing tasks which use software from those Microsoft are paying to participate and occasional github project.

 

[Squid Surprise]

The REAL stat would be xx% of ALL Windows users use apps that are offered as native to the ARM ecosystem.

Until THAT number is north of 95%, it’s still inferior.

 

[VariableSpike]

I would guess there is some major selection bias going on here - if you needed to use apps that don't have an ARM version a lot, well you probably wouldn't have purchased a Snapdragon laptop in the first place.

Yeah, and especially considering the performance class of these devices (I.e. low power and battery focused, though how well they achieve that is another topic), its not like they're going to be trying to use apps like Photoshop, not exactly difficult to make a browser or file viewer native...

 

[brucek]

On the other hand they wouldn't be ARM users if it didn't meet their needs, so this is measuring a specific and self-selected population.

What's the % of all Windows application usage?

Also not sure on the fine print but if "time" means every second the device is powered up, and idling while displaying the desktop or screen saver is counted as a native ARM app, that would also inflate the number quite a bit.

Don't mean to imply it's not achievable - Apple certainly pulled it off with their M-series chips - but may be harder with a fragmented Windows audience.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

My guess is 95 percent of this is using a web browser, which has supplanted many standalone apps for consumers.

 

[bandit8623]

If I didnt game I would actually think about one... for a work laptop/pc for a sales person it probably would work ok. for anyone that needs to install anything and everything... not so sure.

 

[ET3D]

The problem is that it's the same stat from a year ago, and the same apps from a year ago. ARM didn't mention any major app that wasn't already available for native ARM about a year ago at least in beta form.

While there are quite a few open source apps with native Windows ARM versions, it looks to me like no major commercial vendors have any interest in porting to ARM, which is reasonable considering the small number of sales.

So from my point of view Windows for ARM looks dead in the water. I have a sliver of hope that NVIDIA might be able to revive it by actually paying developers to port software, something that Microsoft and Qualcomm are apparently not overly interested in.