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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.
they're probably talking about wanting to run Android/iOS apps on Windows 10 phones.
the headline accidentally left out a word.
Windows 10 Can Run Reworked Android and iOS Apps, Badly
a.k.a. "a better DOS than DOS" and "a better Windows than Windows." That did not end well.
Hey Google and Apple, how about changing your API just enough to break Microsoft's implementation every time they release a version? Pleeeeease.
LOL
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.
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:
Why would anyone need to reverse engineer open source libraries from Android?
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.
I don't respond to AC's.
To avoid Oracle's copyrights!
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.
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.
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!
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.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
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.
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.
Nokia already did that for the Nokia-X. Maybe that's why Microsoft bought Nokia.