“It’s official. Microsoft has surrendered the mobile space to Apple and Google,” Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes for ZDNet. “What is happening with Project Astoria, Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform Bridge toolkit, is that Android developers can build “Windows” apps for phones by reusing their Android code. I say “Windows,” because Microsoft is doing this by running Android Open Source Project (AOSP) to run as a subsystem. In short, these apps will be running on Android, which will be running in emulation on Windows. Okay programmers, what do you get when you run something in emulation? That’s right. You get slow performance.”
“For iOS programmers, it’s even more complicated. In Project Islandwood, Microsoft is introducing a Universal Windows Platform Bridge toolkit that promises to enable you to develop Windows apps using Objective-C,” Vaughan-Nichols writes. “With your iOS programs you’re going to need to actually port them to Windows Mobile. The plus side is these apps should run faster on Windows Mobile than Android. The minus is that Apple iPhone and iPad developers will need to spend more time reworking their applications to run on Windows Mobile.”
“Put this together and here’s what I see,” Vaughan-Nichols writes. “First, if you’re a Windows Phone or RT developer, may I ask why? By IDC’s February 2015 count, Google and Apple’s respective mobile operating systems together come to 96.3 percent all smartphone shipments worldwide… I simply see no reason to bother with building Windows Mobile specific apps… I think Microsoft is making a desperate play to stay relevant in the mobile space with its own operating system and it’s one that’s destined to fail. Microsoft would be better off continuing to focus its effort on porting its applications to Android and iOS.”
Many more details in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Shh! Let Microsoft’s wrong choice of a CEO lead them further down the rat hole that Ballmer T. Clown began digging years ago.
Related article:
Desperate Microsoft announces tool for porting iOS apps to Windows Phones – April 29, 2015
Satya Nadella? Seriously, Microsoft? – January 31, 2014