Windows 10 Can Run Reworked Android and iOS Apps

An anonymous reader writes with this interesting news from Microsoft. After months of rumors, Microsoft is revealing its plans to get mobile apps on Windows 10 today. While the company has been investigating emulating Android apps, it has settled on a different solution, or set of solutions, that will allow developers to bring their existing code to Windows 10. iOS and Android developers will be able to port their apps and games directly to Windows universal apps, and Microsoft is enabling this with two new software development kits. On the Android side, Microsoft is enabling developers to use Java and C++ code on Windows 10, and for iOS developers they'll be able to take advantage of their existing Objective C code. 'We want to enable developers to leverage their current code and current skills to start building those Windows applications in the Store, and to be able to extend those applications,' explained Microsoft's Terry Myerson during an interview with The Verge this morning.

Comments

Re:assuming they reverse-engineer the libraries

[arth1]

Why would anyone need to reverse engineer open source libraries from Android?

Re:Why?

[macs4all]

Actually this is hilarious. I remember the first version of MS Word that ran on the PPC Macs, it used a translation layer so they could use the Windows code on the Mac. It was a Dog, it ran slow and crashed often.

Sorry, sonny; that isn't even close to being correct.

The abomination that you are thinking of was MS Word 6.0 (IIRC) for Mac. Notice the "6.0" part of the name. That really does mean that it was the sixth major version of MS Word for the Mac. And it was truly horrible.

What you apparently don't know is that MS Word (and Excel) were available in GUI form for MacOS for at least two major revisions before a fully-GUI version was released for Windows.

Sorry for the Mac-centric link; but it was the only place that I could find that had the dates correct. I personally used MS Word 4.0 for Mac pretty much until the end of MacOS (Classic) in 2001, and it was very stable and "just the right size". Note that this article confirms that the awful, "ported" (emulated) version is Word 6.0...

I didn't know about the Xenix version, or that it was designed by Xerox PARC guys. So, technically, the Mac version was the second GUI version, I guess, then Windows was the third.

Now, get off my lawn!

Re:Why?

[bondsbw]

Windows 10 universal applications will be able to run on all devices, including phones, tablets, desktop, table, Microsoft Band, IoT, Xbox One, etc. If you create a W10 universal app then it will run everywhere. Even the same exact binary will run across all these devices (although, of course, you'll need to make your UI responsive enough to make sense in these environments and with different input mechanisms).

Legacy desktop applications will pretty much be limited to desktops and tablets under Windows 10.

This should be much less confusing than RT was. RT had different capabilities across the same form factor, while Windows 10 will have the same capabilities for the same form factor.