Smartphones are bona fide PCs these days, and in the case of modern flagship smartphones, that's even more the case. With that comes the ability to run a full-fledged operating system on your smartphone too, and as it turns out, you can run Windows 10 on your phone with ease. We don't recommend doing it though, because it's pretty slow and, to be honest, not really worth it.

There are two ways to do it, and the first requires a Google Pixel smartphone and root access. You can install a Magisk module to enable Limbo to use the hypervisor built-in to the kernel, dubbed Kernel-based Virtual Machine, or KVM. This will allow you to run Windows on Arm "natively" on a Pixel smartphone, and it does work. There have been other projects to do this in the past as well, such as the Renegade Project.

However, the way we're going to do it is through Limbo x86, a port of QEMU's x86 emulator, emulating an x86 version of Windows 10 on the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5. The reason for this is two-fold; to use native Arm requires significantly more work, making it so that x86 makes sense to use instead, and also, Windows 11's additional hardware requirements could be a barrier to getting this working.

How to run Windows 10 on your smartphone with QEMU

It's a very involved process

The first step to running Windows 10 on your smartphone is to create a QCOW2 of the Windows version you want to use. QCOW stands for “QEMU Copy On Write,” and it's a disk image format used by QEMU for virtualization.

QCOW2 files have a few features that aid in virtualization, and one major is its Copy on Write (CoW) mechanism. This permits the creation of clone images where modifications are recorded in a separate layer, keeping the original data unchanged. This is especially beneficial for virtualization environments where multiple virtual machines may need to run similar operating systems or software configurations, as it conserves disk space and allows quick deployment of new VM instances. Additionally, QCWC2 supports snapshots, allowing users to save and revert to specific states of a virtual machine at any time.

To create one of these files, you'll need to follow instructions for the particular operating system that you're using. You can find many tools online to assist you in doing this, which you can find some of here. I used a 32-bit build of Windows 10.

Once you have that configured, you'll need to make sure you set up QEMU correctly. You'll need to disable KVM and enable MTTCG, point the hard disk to your QCOW2 file, change graphics to "std". audio to "adlib", and assign enough RAM for it to work. You can play around with these settings depending on your specs.

Running Windows 10 on a smartphone is not for the faint of heart

Nobody needs to do this

If you want to run Windows applications on your smartphone, we highly recommend you just use Winlator instead. Running the entire operating system is sluggish, and while I'm sure there are optimizations I can make (such as if I rooted my smartphone and enabled KVM access), it's just not worth it. However, it's a cool proof of concept that you can get up and running in just a few minutes, and you'll get a complete, full-fledged desktop operating system on your smartphone.

Trying to run applications is a chore, and I waited over a minute for the command line to open. The VM actually crashed when I tried to open Firefox, and there were multiple instances where it crashed trying to boot, as well. It's a fun project, but you shouldn't do it, and if you want to use Windows applications on your smartphone there are other options.

Overall, you can play around with other operating systems on your smartphone, but they're not seriously usable. We recommend emulating the individual programs you want to run on your smartphone instead of emulating the entire operating system, especially given how sluggish this can really be.