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Microsoft Taking Apple's Walled Garden Approach For Metro Apps

Posted by Soulskill on from the leading-from-the-rear dept.

New submitter gauauu writes "Microsoft will be taking a walled-garden approach to Metro apps, only allowing enterprises and developers to side-load Metro apps in Windows 8, while everyone else will have to go through the Windows Store. Note that this only applies to Metro apps; the model for traditional desktop apps won't change."

1 of 389 comments (clear)

  1. Re:To all who said "but the iPhone is not a comput by jo_ham · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Forever - the goals of OS X and iOS are different, despite sharing the same codebase (iOS pretty much is OS X, just trimmed down a bit and with a different UI layer on top).

    One is designed as a closed and protected system, the other is a proprietary GUI on top of a very good Unix OS with increasing numbers of open source parts (not just going in, but projects that are part of the OS being released as open source with no 'forced' legality) that wants to use open standards as much as possible.

    OS X is about a proprietary GUI on an open source core running on custom hardware and promoting open standards

    iOS is about controlling the user experience carefully on a handheld device.

    While they have certainly pulled a few features back over into OS X (the app store, the way parts of the GUI work, especially launching of apps), I don't think it is going away - if nothing else the number of open source projects involved in it that Apple continue to release would suggest that they don't see the benefit of getting rid of OS X - if anything it's opening up more as it matures in some key respects.