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

Why?

[wardrich86]

Why would anybody want this? I can't think of any mobile apps that would be useful on a regular computer. Most of the really useful mobile apps are only really specific to the fact they're being run on a mobile device, and/or are really only helpful for bridging a gap between a phone and a computer.

Re:Why?

[Spy Handler]

they're probably talking about wanting to run Android/iOS apps on Windows 10 phones.

Re:Why?

[wardrich86]

Ah. That would make a bit more sense.

Re:Why?

[armanox]

It's not just games that people run on phones. And regardless, Microsoft wants (read; needs) people to release programs in general for Windows mobile, so they seem to be going the path of making it easy for people to just hit "compile" and be able to deploy it.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

To me it still doesn't make sense why they call the desktop OS Windows 8/Windows 10 and the phone OS Windows 8/Windows 10. Why they have two types of tablets: one that runs Windows 8 and can thus run Windows 8 programs, and another that runs Windows 8 and thus can run Windows 8 but also applications of Windows 8. Unfortunately the first tablet with Windows 8 can't run Windows 8 programs because the Windows 8 programs have to be completely rewritten in another language. On the phones with Windows 8 you can also only run Windows 8 programs and none of the Windows 8 programs.

They did the same thing with Outlook. You have Outlook which is web mail, and you have Outlook which is a mail client. You can use Outlook on its own or you can use Outlook to check Outlook mails. Outlook can check any mail, and you will have to configure Outlook to receive your mails. Outlook on the other hand is just web based and after registering for an account you can check your mail online.
 
And they also have Skype and Skype. Skype is a consumer oriented VoIP product while Skype is a business oriented VoIP product. You can not log in with your Skype account on Skype, neither can you use your Skype account on Skype. But I don't know for sure about this last statement, I have never used Skype, only Skype, but it might be that you can use Skype accounts on Skype.

I think it would also be a wise choice to rename the Windows servers OS to Azur, now it's way too confusing with those different names.
 
  Maybe they will once launch their own social media and call it SharePoint, so you have SharePoint and SharePoint, SharePoint is a collaboration tool, while SharePoint is a social media...

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.

Re:Why?

[macs4all]

While it was poorly worded, he meant to say the first PowerPC-native version of Word for Mac System 7.5. That would probably be Word 6.0. And it was ass-slow and terrible.

And what was really hysterical was that the 68k versions of Word ran circles around Word 6.0, even though they were running through Apple's 68k -> PPC JIT Compiler!!!

Yes,,WORD 6 sucked. I know. I tried to use it for about a month when it came out.

Re:Why?

[Dog-Cow]

That joke may have been funny about 5 years ago. Might.

My parents, siblings and their spouses use Windows Phones. They aren't horrible, though they do suffer from a lack of apps. Which is probably why MS is going to the trouble of making porting really easy.

*Badly

[netsavior]

the headline accidentally left out a word.

Windows 10 Can Run Reworked Android and iOS Apps, Badly

Re:*Badly

[CastrTroy]

I think the main question is how much reworking is needed to make the apps run well. Reworking could mean anything from ensuring there is no requirement for things that possibly couldn't exist on a standard windows machine, such as games that require tilt controls. It could also mean rewriting 90% of the code. There's no reason why they shouldn't be able to get this to work. If they can get Android and iOS apps to run on windows tablets, phones, and desktops, then that will be one more reason for users to switch back to Windows. Personally, I have a Windows tablet and I love it. The only real problem is the small number of apps. If they could make iOS and Android apps run on it, then all the better.

Re:*Badly

[AmiMoJo]

Just think about the UI for a moment. Ported apps are going to suck, and be a horrible mish-mash of three radically different UIs. Android has a back button, iOS and Windows do not. On iOS you usually get some custom "back" functionality, on Windows most apps don't use that paradigm at all.

What about notifications? I haven't seen Windows Phone's implementation, but Android notifications are light years ahead of the simple ones that iOS supports. There is a lot of functionality built in to the Android notification system, and many apps make extensive use of it.

iOS apps don't access a filesystem, they use the device's media databases which are all descended from the iTunes database. Windows will probably just map those to the contents of your personal folder, which I don't even use for data.

This might work for simple apps like self-contained games, but any developer that limits themselves to the features available on both Windows and Android/iOS is going to be turning out crap that doesn't suit either system well. Maybe they will try to pepper their code with #ifdefs.

Re:*Badly

[antiperimetaparalogo]

Well, in Greece we have the (rougtly translated) saying "something is better than nothing"!

The American equivalent is "Half a loaf (of bread) is better than no loaf at all."

I like your American equivalent - it's more "paradigmatic"!

But, remembering the painful days of software Windows emulation on Macs, I don't think that either the Geek nor American phrase applies here!!!

Hmmm.... maybe the G[r]eek could apply?

Re:*Badly

[Ancil]

Android has a back button, iOS and Windows do not.

Actually, Android and Windows Phone both have dedicated back buttons. iPhone is the outlier here.

What about notifications? I haven't seen Windows Phone's implementation, but Android notifications are light years ahead of the simple ones that iOS supports.

Notification functionality is pretty much identical on my Windows Phone and Nexus 5.

This stuff is all simple. The hard thing to emulate would be in-app advertisements and in-app purchases. Developers take that very seriously, for obvious reasons.

Shades of OS/2...

[Anonymous Coward]

a.k.a. "a better DOS than DOS" and "a better Windows than Windows." That did not end well.

So can a Commodore 64

[NotDrWho]

It just requires a little more "reworking."

Yes, can we do this to Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Google and Apple, how about changing your API just enough to break Microsoft's implementation every time they release a version? Pleeeeease.

LOL

MS giving up on mobile development

[Dracos]

What I'm reading is that MS has all but given up on Windows as a mobile development platform for the sake of being able to run Android/iOS apps.

It also serves as a tacit acknowledgment that MS isn't connecting with mobile developers, and that mobile apps drive mobile platforms.

Re:MS giving up on mobile development

[MightyMartian]

This reminds me a lot of how IBM tried to deal with 32 bit Windows compatibility. They created a set of libraries and APIs to try to facilitate the easy porting of Win32 software to OS/2. In the end, developers simply didn't bite, because IBM's desktop market share was too low to make it worth it. I see Microsoft running up against the same problem; why bother going through the effort, even with assistance, of porting mobile apps from the two dominant platforms (and by dominant I mean dominating something like 90%+ of all mobile devices)?

This is an old tactic

[Anonymous Coward]

In the 80's Microsoft wrote their applications to be able to import files in formats from other companies, but not export back to the same formats. Examples were lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect. This tactic was a trick to encourage and then lock in developers to work only on the Windows platform using Microsoft's software. It also explains their reluctance to make easily available export tools to Open Office formats unless forced by a government such at the UK.

Examples of this trick:

1. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-excel/convert-lotus-123-wk4-to-excel-2010/f9508a7f-9cd0-418e-aac8-0e01f0e26da1
2. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2671933
3. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4540
4. Results of google searching for openoffice converter at microsoft.com: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1CAHPZY_enUS566US566&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8#q=microsoft+openoffice++converter+site:microsoft.com
5. And lastly check what page hits a google search of microsoft.com returns: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1CAHPZY_enUS566US566&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8#q=microsoft+converter+site:microsoft.com

Re:This is an old tactic

[Bing Tsher E]

In the 80's Microsoft wrote their applications to be able to import files in formats from other companies, but not export back to the same formats. Examples were lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect. This tactic was a trick to encourage and then lock in developers to work only on the Windows platform using Microsoft's software.

Huh? Application developers in the 80's were dependent on and 'trapped' by Microsoft's Office file formats? That's just a weird theory. Which applications do you mean? Don't say 'Wordperfect and Lotis 1-2-3' because those weren't applications whose developers were 'fooled'.

And Wordperfect was mainly just strong because it had free tech support, so that there was a bossy secretary at each business who knew that alt-flipper-f4 was the secret key combination. It was shit as far as a pick-it-up-and-go tool for everybody else.

Re:assuming they reverse-engineer the libraries

[arth1]

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

Re:Metro UI

[DogDude]

I buy Windows Phone because of the UI. It's about a decade ahead of Android and Apple's "lots of little random icons on a grid" thing that most people still tolerate for some bizarre reason.

Wouldn't it be easier to just have an emulator?

[Karmashock]

I am a big believer in emulators. Just have an emulator that can run android or ios apps sort of like wine emulates windows apps for linux.

Every OS should have a suite of emulators that can run any program from any other operating system.

Yes, you take a performance hit when you emulate but if your computer is speedy you don't notice.

I have a virtual OSX, Virtual linux, and a couple virtual flavors of windows on my PC. I can run pretty much anything. At top speed without a performance hit? No... OSX especially is a little bit slower because the optimization isn't great. I love my virtual machines.

Re:Wouldn't it be easier to just have an emulator?

[R3d M3rcury]

Yes, you take a performance hit when you emulate but if your computer is speedy you don't notice.

On the other hand, if your "computer" (i.e., cell-phone, tablet) is not speedy, you will. And if your computer uses batteries, you will also notice.

Nevermind - Islandwood

[SuperKendall]

It looks like in fact Microsoft is providing some kind of middle layer which provides much of the iOS framework libraries, they are calling it "Islandwood". Couldn't find details beyond that though.

It doesn't mean much to me that a game was ported with minimal effort since that would mostly be using OpenGL and the like.

Re:assuming they reverse-engineer the libraries

[SEE]

To avoid Oracle's copyrights!

Hypocrites

[damicatz]

Microsoft was an amicus supporting Oracle in their efforts to copyright APIs.

Now they want to turn around and do the exact same thing, only for Android and iOS. And to top that all off, their entire success is based on the fact that they were able to rip off the CP/M APIs and clone them for IBM and do so for much cheaper than what DR wanted.

Re:assuming they reverse-engineer the libraries

[farble1670]

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

because they are also providing MSFT implementations of the Google APIs which of course are not open source. should be easy enough. e.g., provide a maps implementation that works exactly like Google maps.

Re:Metro UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Just modded you up because: (1) I rather like the Windows Phone UI and (2) because Microsoft did it's own thing while Google just aped what Apple was doing. I'm going to get down-modded into oblivion for pointing that last part out but I saw early Android prototypes and they were very clearly Blackberry killers.

Windows sucks because they emulated Apple.

[WaffleMonster]

Microsoft is killing themselves. Lowering the cost of porting applications is no substitute for generating organic demand for a platform people see value in using.

MS has a technologically sound platform yet their desperate attempts at "Apple emulation" is costing them dearly in terms of hackers and developers in a position to want to write software for WP.

The platform is openly hostile to customization and demonstrates no respect for privacy or rights of its users.

In addition to failing to offer basic features available in other platforms including insanely enough even features present in previous generations of "Windows Mobile".

Until this changes good luck getting anyone to care about using the platform much less develop software for it.

Re:assuming they reverse-engineer the libraries

[im_thatoneguy]

Nokia already did that for the Nokia-X. Maybe that's why Microsoft bought Nokia.

Re:Metro UI

[sonicmerlin]

But they're still using flat, ugly single palette squares that turn your home screen into a claustrophobic nightmare. And what's the point of a live tile when you can't interact with it?