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Microsoft Rumored To Integrate Android Apps
phmadore writes "Windows Phone has been struggling for market share, largely due to a serious lack of developers willing to invest their time in what one might consider a niche market. Statistically speaking, Android has more than 1.1M apps to Windows Phone's 200,000+. Well, according to unnamed sources informing the Verge, Microsoft may soon integrate/allow Android applications into both Windows and Windows Phone."
This follows the recent debate over whether Microsoft should try to fork Android. Peter Bright made the point that doing so would be extremely difficult, and probably not worth Microsoft's time. Ben Thompson has an insightful post about how Microsoft's real decision is whether to focus on devices or services.
Dear Slashdot User,
Speaking for myself as AC but reflecting on everything.
This comment is about Beta and the revolt. If you're not interested do move on, sorry for the brief interruption and Thanks.
I'll start by saying surely there's folk bothered by the anti-beta floods. I apologize if it's frustrated anyone who wants normal discussion flow. The fact is there's some of us who feel (super) passionate about this drastic redesign. Nerd or Don Juan, whatever [buzzword that describes you]...it would take a lobotomized sociopath to not even feebly feel something unsettling about the yanking of the historic roots of this site we call slashdot.org. Whether 1997 or 2006 or 2010 was your first time around these woods... there's much to admire and appreciate.
My bias is that I am 101% anti-beta on all points including ease of use, functionality & decimation of dense threaded discussion. It's ugly and hideous to me on so many levels. I could go on with a list UI details, I'll push that aside for now.
What I'm here to say is that as unprecedented as Slashdot's rise was - equally unprecedented is the scene unfolding in the altslashdot/slashcott movement. For or against, let's pause to admit this truth.
I feel what needs acknowledgement of the anti-beta movement is the validity of our own emotions here. I think the most passionate grew up with this site thru many phases of their lives. It's not just about the news business. I view Slashdot as an unprecedented cultural icon. A bizarre and intriguing global public forum - delivered to us reliably at every request direct to our private, personal computers.
-From trolls to flamewars to humor to all the memes, prose & poetry, robot crap-flooding to real intelligent valuable discussion and debate-
(If there was all of 1, it wouldn't work. It was that they all got to play)
Don't let what some call "immature" anti beta flooding fog your perception of the movement that is altslashdot. We are 150 strong in the channel and rising. We are busy resurrecting a dusty time machine that is the Slashcode from a long, ill-destined slumber. In all ~16 years of this site's unprecedented growth and dull drifting into "irrelevance" - can you say the community has ever been this ignited? This united?
I watch Facebook and Google+ destroy persona. I watch Google+ destroy old Google. I watch numerous sites redesign into turgid-with-whitespace messes. For some reason, the decimation of old Slashdot kicks me the in gut harder than the lamest trends of 3.0 and SOME lame things of 2.0.
I'm not saying I have all the answers. I have questions, too. Malda, how could you leave your dear creation in such apparently heavily corporate non-community minded hands? Why not some sort of not-for-profit to keep operational? Anything to at least let it operate with self-respect and not have to morph into something so ugly that is Beta. Oh well, I'm not a tycoon how would I know.
Maybe it's just the last straw for some of us. I believe altslashdot of many things goes beyond Slashdot itself and represents the intangible kicked-in-the-stomach feelings of many as the Internet changes over time - in this case not for the better.
To conclude, disgust with Beta can be expressed in many shades of grey, black or white. A heroic and perilous historical movement is taking place, ##altslashdot being the core of its engine. We battle for our beliefs like never before in the face of a twisted, ugly monster (that is not only Beta itself the end product, but all that is that conceived its bastardly existence).
We are trying to launch a Slashdot of old into the modern world. Our mission is community and absence of pure profit driven design. There's no free lunch but Lord let there be potlucks!
And I encourage you to join not to support nor pan per say... but to simply witness an awesome part of history unfold. A rebirth. A reclamation.
It's not so much whether we fail or succeed. It's about believing i
If they can run Android apps with the same OS level security as iOS, and the same level of app vetting as the Apple App Store - they may be onto something.
So MS has 20+% of the apps that Android has, that doesn't sound horrible. How many of those Android apps are garbage? The numbers aren't the whole story, if the 200k are much better quality than most of the 1.1M the Windows phone would win. I am not saying that is the case, just saying that comparing the number of apps in a store isn't useful information.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
I find it rather amusing that Microsoft has to resort to implementing what's basically a reverse Wine because no one cares enough about their platform to write "native" (read: HTML5) crapps for it.
Statistically speaking, Android has more than 1.1M apps to Windows Phone's 200,000+
Thanks for clarifying how you were speaking, or I would have no idea how to compare those two numbers!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Too many apps rely on proprietary stuff from Google, the part from Android that is really OS is getting smaller and smaller every time Google adds an update. And if you want to get the latest stuff from Google you're on Google's terms, meaning you have to use the Play Store, Google as a search engine and everything that comes with it.
That said, I can't think of a reason why Microsoft should not integrate Android applications, provided the results gives some reasonable user experience. I suspect that "supporting" Android applications where the user has to put up with significant numbers of crashes and hangs, rendering errors, screen geometry issues and so forth would actually hurt the platform further.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
As long as they don't allow the Slashdot beta on their store I'm okay with that.
Did anyone notice that Microsoft already has an Android phone? Not "Android compatible" but 100% Android?
http://www.businessinsider.com...
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I have a suggestion about Beta Slashdot, why not have peoples chose between the 2 interface when they enter the website, Classic or Beta. I know some internet site that give choices like that. Why not Slashdot.
As a Windows Phone user I think this is a terrible idea. Didn't BlackBerry already try this? Did it help them? I don't think so. It is a slippery slope that only leads to irrelevance.
The beauty of Windows Phone is that it is not like Android and iOS. Well written WP apps, which follow the Metro (I know they don't call it that anymore) design philosophy integrate beautifully into the environment. Slapping Android apps, which follow very different conventions would diminish the user experience.
Code to live, live to code.
So MS has 20+% of the apps that Android has, that doesn't sound horrible. How many of those Android apps are garbage? The numbers aren't the whole story, if the 200k are much better quality than most of the 1.1M the Windows phone would win. I am not saying that is the case, just saying that comparing the number of apps in a store isn't useful information.
Right, its like Fake Steve Jobs used to say "I'd rather have the 1% market that was the cream, than 99% of the crap.".
I find app stores annoying because there's too many copycat apps and too little info. You can't tell if its worth buying the expensive one or the free one. You can barely even screen a fraction of them when it's garden variety purpose.
But on a different tangent, it seems like this is effectively Wine for Windows. That is the API to run android apps in windows. I love the irony.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
So...they're basically going to do the same thing OS/2 did with Windows applications? How well did that work out for OS/2?
Glad I looked more closely at the summary before proceeding with my original thought for a comment -- I was going to link to that exact article. The key point for those who don't RTFAs:
WHAT SHOULD MICROSOFT DO?
Choose between devices and services. The problem with pursuing both, as Microsoft is doing, is that strategy taxes are inevitable. If you favor your devices by giving them better services, you are by definition limiting your services on competing devices. Meanwhile, by offering your services on competing devices, you are limiting the competitive advantage of your devices.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Remember, back in the day, when the last of the dinosaurs were being hunted to extinction by Cro-magnon man and Sun was still not-wholly-doomed?
.NETly features that Android doesn't. It'll be just like the good old days!
In order to mess with them, MS created the MS JRM, which was almost like the Sun JVM except not, in ways so obnoxious that the courts eventually forced them to back off.
Now, since Dalvik is Totally Definitely Not a JVM, MS is presumably free to produce MS Dalvik (they'll probably call it 'Microsoft Mobile Platform Interoperability Foundation 2012' or something) that supports Android applications, and has a few extra little
I'd rather have the 99%, because, well, no matter how you cut it, I'd be making a lot more money.
No, it does matter how you cut it. Currently Apple is making 87% of the profits in the mobile space, Samsung 30%...
The overage is the amount those two companies are taking money not just from consumers, but how much other companies are pouring money into a black hole.
And from a developer side the cut still matters, as you can still make a lot more income from iOS apps than Android despite there supposedly being a lot more Android devices people could run apps on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I already said in the original message that other companies in the space are losing money. That's why the profits add up to more than 100%.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You weren't kidding http://ts4.mm.bing.net/th?id=H...
Bill, Steve and Satya sit down to plan how to take over mobile.
Bill, "We've got to do this like I predicted 12 years ago."
Steve, "Right. Our engineers have been working 24 hours a day on this so we can allow any app to run on our mobile. It's going to be great Microsoft Mobile Everything Everywhere."
Satya, " .." "With all due respect Everything Everywhere is not going to work, unless you carry a PC in your pocket."
I'll bet you anything this won't support native code, just like BlackBerry's Android compatibility box. Supporting native code would require running an actual Android kernel, because native code can perform system calls and all that -- it's outside of the Java sandbox.
This isn't a rumor, it's just a news article. The article is titled "Analysis: Satya Nadella must kill Windows Phone and fork Android".
Nowhere has Microsoft given any impression that they are considering this, this is simply a writer for The Guardian thwoing out a crazy idea. From a technical and business standpoint, it's a very rough idea for Windows Phone.
Windows Phone has been doing pretty well too recently, at least as far as market share growth and raw sales numbers are concerned. It's doing quite well in Europe (which US news downplays), and in the US marketshare went from 2.6% to 4.7% over the last year. Obviously not very impressive but it's far from a dying platform.
When OS/2 was struggling for market share, IBM decided that they could bring along more customers by allowing Windows programs to run on OS/2. So they put a whole lot of effort into it and the result was a disaster. The few programs that used to have an OS/2 version no longer did. The program maker didn't see a reason to make an OS/2 version if their Windows version ran on OS/2 too. And customers saw that Windows programs ran better on Windows than on OS/2, so why buy an OS/2 machine if all of the programs you want to run, run better on this cheaper Windows machine?
Microsoft is almost completely irrelevant as a provider of mobile devices. Why write such a prominent article, on a company that targets only a tiny part of the budget market for mobile devices? It doesn't really matter what Microsoft do. The problem is that their devices run Windows, not that they don't really have any software.
Try using a Windows phone, and you will quickly see why they are largely irrelevant.
Microsoft shouldn't fork Android. They should cease behaving badly, and become another Android phone provider. It would serve Microsoft much better, to not be a patent huckster. It damages Microsoft to behave like this, more than it damages their competitors. Who wants to do business with a company that uses these kind of tactics?
Visual Studio could be adapted quite nicely as an Android development toolchain, and Microsoft have online services to offer. The day of single vendor platforms has long passed. It looks likely that Apple will also fade fairly quickly for different reasons, as cheaper devices commoditise once quite expensive functionality. In such an environment, Apple really have nowhere to go. They have never been a hardware innovator - just a re-packager of other vendors technology. At high price points, that Apple business model could work, but as prices drop, their margins will be squeezed, and their management will likely panic, and resort to unethical behaviour, like patent hucksterism.
If MS allowed Android mobile apps on Windows, it would be all but admitting Metro is an utter failure. Then they could rip Metro out of desktop Windows and give us our start menu back! Let's close the book on Metro and never speak of it again.
IBM's OS/2 was able to run DOS and Windows problems. OS/2 was billed as "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows".
I've always thought that feature was actually OS/2's downfall. Back in the day when I had to make a choice whether to develop for Windows or for OS/2 I chose Windows because I knew that my program would run on both Windows *and* OS/2.
So, implementing Android compatibility guarantees that nobody will develop for Windows Phone. As OS/2 proved, making Windows Phone a "better Android than an Android" is a losing strategy.
Give it up, MS. You've lost mobile all over again. This is just another repeat of WinMo 6/6.5 and not many people are going to put up with it. So instead of bowing out when you knew you were beaten, you've proceeded to beat the dead horse and wasting more money on failed products. The fact that both you and Blackberry have been trying to get Android apps to run on your platforms is telling of a serious lack of confidense on your software. Just give up.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
hahaha he does look like he has goiter
Didn't IBM attempt to give its hopeless OS/2 project compatibility with software released for Microsoft's Windows? Have any of these semi-emulation schemes ever worked out for the computer company seeking to stay 'trendy'.
Didn't Blackberry claim that their idiotic proprietary OS had enough backward compatibility to run Android apps? Is WINE really solving the problems of people who would like to run Windows apps on Linux?
Here's the dirtly little secret of computer success. Your customer must have an "IT JUST WORKS" experience. Not, it kinda works, maybe, if you fiddle this and that and ignore the bugs and missing functions.
It gets WORSE for Microsoft. Microsoft is still trying to juggle x86 and ARM, now both for proper Windows, Windows RT, and the crippled Windows phone OS. Microsoft needs to commit wholly to ARM, drop x86 and Intel, except for legacy desktop Windows systems, and then, and only then, think about what it needs to do about Android.
Android does NOT run properly on Intel x86, and never ever will. As ARM chips get more powerful, all worthwhile Android apps will carry ARM binary payloads, the same issue that killed Windows on anything BUT an x86 box, back in the days when Microsoft supported Windows NT on at least 3 other CPU architectures. An Android app should ALWAYS mean an ARM app, just as a Windows app always means an x86/x64 app.
Just a general statement reading posts involving Blackberry. You should really head over to crackberry and learn about the current state of BB10. It's a pretty damned impressive phone. And it runs most Android apps FLAWLESSLY. And sideloading is pretty much a thing of the past thanks to an app called Snap.
I assumed y'all were smarter than a bag of hammers, and could google up more current results yourself. My mistake! You really *can* be that stupid!
Since you are so inept, here you go.
Sorry, Samsung was 32%, I was rounding a bit from memory - Apple was also higher, 87.4%.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your main problem is that no-one else agrees with you.
Complain to them, not someone who is merely repeating facts of the matter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Shazbot! We ran into some trouble getting the comments.
Try again... na-nu, na-nu!
Microsoft may soon integrate/allow Android applications into both Windows and Windows Phone."
So why buy a windows phone to run Android apps then?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Half-assed efforts to allow Android apps via emulation didn't help RIM and it won't help MS. If the apps run perfectly, what is the reason to buy a MS tablet? If only some apps run, what is the reason to buy a MS tablet? I bet MS makes the Android apps run sub-par compared to native windows apps.
Where is OS/2 today? http://www.osnews.com/story/26780/What_Ever_Happened_to_OS_2_
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com...
source: http://www.businessinsider.com...
Your main problem is that no-one else agrees with you.
How do you conclude that "no-one else agrees" with him based on that link? Just because you have found some sources that are contradictory to his point does not make him wrong, you know I can find a variety of different opinions on climate change too. Your main problem is that you believe that because it came from investors.com it must be right even though you dont understand it at all.
Complain to them, not someone who is merely repeating facts of the matter.
Why are you repeating it if you don't even understand it enough to refute his point? His point is valid, how is it that an industry can "lose profit"? Or even make a negative profit? The profit does not include the loss that is why profit and loss are two separate things, combining them is a disingenuous attempt to fool people who don't understand the concept and not only did you get fooled but you are propagating that nonsense.
2014 is the year of the Windows Phone! It will happen!
If I was Microsoft, I would be changing the way things work for Windows Phone app development. I would allow developers to register devices with MS and be able to write and load their own apps on the device without paying any money. The fees would only apply if you wanted to release your app to the world through the marketplace.
Make sure its not possible to use this to load pirated apps and make it difficult (i.e. gotta go to MS, register the device, install Visual Studio and the Windows Phone SDK, then load the apps via Visual Studio) to reduce the chance of people simply using this as a way to distribute "side-loaded" apps (i.e. things Microsoft doesn't want on Windows Phone or things where people don't want to pay MS)
This would mean people could develop for Windows Phone (both in the emulator and the actual hardware) at basically zero cost (other than buying the actual phone) and then if they decide they have something releasable, they can go to MS and get it approved and released (and pay the money). So all those who want to see if Windows Phone is a platform worth supporting without investing too heavily in it can do so.
Naw, the parent clearly means the Greater Toronto Area.
Perhaps Mayor Ford strikes again?
This may seem infeasible and/or culture-prohibitive, but there's another way Microsoft could go, which could see them gaining market share in mobile, and perhaps even surpassing google/Apple eventually.
Instead of trying to figure out how to optimally leverage the technology and assets they currently have (Nokia, Office, Windows Phone, patents, etc.) to optimize their own profit, as they have been doing for the last decade or so, they could try something new: building something which actual customers want. I know it's somewhat unheard of in the age of big companies, patent portfolios, and quarterly reports, but anyone who think there's not substantial room for innovation in virtually all aspects of the mobile space is simply not trying to think.
Microsoft had (and still has remnants of) the technical might to pursue multiple avenues of innovation at the same time. If they could simply change focus away from brow-beating their reluctant customers with their latest profit-optimized business plan, and toward giving customers what they actually want (here's a free hint: a phone where you are in control of where your data is, and what apps can access it), they could still do quite well. If they continue their current business mindset, though, it won't matter what they pick to focus on: eventually, they will be toast.
They already did the first part. The dev tools are free. You can do "developer registration" (enable sideloading on a phone) with any Microsoft (Live/Hotmail/Passport/whatever) account, even one that isn't tied to a Marketplace account. This has been the case since some time in 2013...
They have protections against pirating apps (the downloads from the store are DRM-encrypted and can't be sideloaded) and have also restricted the number of sideloaded apps you can have at a time (actually, that restriction was always there; it's just lower for free accounts than for paid ones) as well.
I suspect their motivation is exactly what you describe. If it's working, though, it is taking some time to do so. Part of the problem is that nobody seems to care. I submitted a story about it to /. back when they made the change, it was rejected. None of the big tech news sites said much about it either...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
so were smiling each time one is sold :} or to that effect.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
Archive for July 27th, 2011
The Microsoft/Android war: Which patents are at stake?
"You may already know Microsoft has forced five Android vendors to pay royalties each time they ship a device, and is suing Motorola and Barnes & Noble in cases that claim Android steals Microsoft intellectual property."
http://ineedinfonow.wordpress....
Describes nine patents Motorola allegedly infringes upon.
"Given that a deep-pocketed vendor like HTC already settled with Microsoft and is paying Redmond each time it sells an Android phone, it would seem Microsoft's lawyers can be quite convincing."
Googles' putting up it's own satellites and Microsoft is scrambling for a bit of the Android action, my how times have changed.
Microsoft invested in it's future through patents, being one of the larger patent trolls is an action befitting Microsoft.
Phone OSs are quickly approaching the same plateau already reached by desktop OSs: the underlying OS doesn't actually matter. What users and customers want to DO is provided not by the OS but by apps they run. When they want to check email, tweet, update Facebook or play a game, they don't _care_ what OS supports it. They only care that they can, or cannot, do the things they want to do.
The problem for Microsoft and Blackberry is that they have the OS but they do not have the stuff to run on it. The quick way to fix this problem is to take the stuff people want and allow/make it run on your OS, and generally hope the public buys it.
This has not helped Blackberry because Blackberry is not cool, because nobody carries it so there's no peer envy, because the company reeks of instability and that scares customers, and because the US carriers don't do much to support it. And BB itself does not seem to actually bother to promote this compatibility. What good is a superpower you never use or talk about?
Windows Phone has other issues, one of which is the name Windows, which I insist in my own way is a terrible brand name for a product that has nothing to do with the "windows and manila file folders" concept, and it ties it to the desktop OS, which is used but not exactly beloved. They should have called it something else. The other problems are similar to Blackberry. Lack of peer envy, lack of carrier support, lack of OEM support (buying Nokia did not help this), and lack of any sexy reason to choose Windows Phone over Android or iPhone. Windows Phone fans say it runs better, does this or that better. They miss that "better than" means nothing when most people will never see it, much less compare it to their iPhone or Galaxy.
Getting people to think about Windows Phone means giving them a reason to bother getting closer than 40 feet away. A big campaign "We run Android's million+ apps!" is better than nothing. It removes an objection. It may add an enticement. Maybe. It beats a empty app store and developer issues.
Sig for hire.
What a moronic idea.