Android and iOS App Porting Will Not Be Available At Windows 10 Launch

An anonymous reader writes: Arguably the biggest news out of Microsoft's Build 2015 conference was that developers will be able to bring Web apps, Windows desktop apps (Win32), as well as Android and iOS mobile apps to the Windows Store. Yet each of these work differently, and there are a lot of nuances, so we talked to Todd Brix, general manager of Windows apps and store, to get some more detail. First and foremost, upon Windows 10's launch, developers will only be able to bring Web apps to the Windows Store. The Win32, Android, and iOS app toolkits will not be ready in time. That said, with Microsoft's Windows as a service strategy, they will arrive as part of later updates

Comments

Re:More important than the technical questions is

[im_thatoneguy]

Who said "Desktop" the point is to get these onto Smartphones and Tablets. The fact that it'll also run on the desktop is sort of besides the point.

Not sure of the benefit here

[rsilvergun]

any app simple enough to run on both mobile & desktop is probably a web app. I guess there's games, but I've played ports of mobile games and they don't work. The design choices you make with mobile are completely different, and you usually end up with something that plays poorly on both. Ground Pounders was like that. Tons of control features were missing from the desktop port because they didn't work in mobile, and the game suffered for it...

Re:What, no Clippy?

[slack_justyb]

To address each of your points.

Photoshop - Does anyone "really" run this on Windows?! I thought that was mostly a Mac thing, but whatever, I'll give that one to you.

Full Office - This is the big thing about the Build 2015, Office becoming its own platform. This "run Android / iOS" crap pales in comparison to the Office as a platform part. If Microsoft can do this whole thing "right" Office will become bigger than anything they imagined.

World of Warcraft - Really? Just no, you don't get that one.

All productivity software - That depends on your definition of that word. Many of our most productive folks work with OLAP cubes and our big data stuff in all in cloud. Most documentation done in house is in the cloud with the software to produce it in the cloud. To be fair though, we're mostly an IBM i shop and most everything runs on that i, aside from Excel, Word, and PowerPoint (we ditched Exchanged long time ago and wondered why we didn't do it sooner). So because of your vague-iness, I'm not giving you that one, and also a lot of productivity isn't done by humans anyway and the part that is done requires different tools than the tools people used for productivity ten years ago.

I'm pretty sure Windows has a place in the future, but desktop for the majority of folks is dead. I see more and more iPads with BT keyboards replacing laptops at colleges, I see more big data/cloud services in companies, I see more things becoming automated that once was some "productivity" thing humans did. Each day I see fat desktops becoming less usable. That's not to say they'll go away, far from that, but they aren't going to be the dominate device for much longer. Microsoft has had some serious issues with getting a solid mobile product to market and it is killing them. If they make good on the Office as a platform thing, they'll be in a much better position than they are now. However, we are past the point where Microsoft just has to put out a good device or a good OS. They've got to become the preferred device, the preferred OS. People are going to have some random Wintel in their house that gets dusted off for the term paper or whatever, but Microsoft really needs to get into the position where people are letting their iPhones collect dust if they really stand a chance for a brighter future than being relegated to the thing you see when you get to work.

Re:More important than the technical questions is

[slack_justyb]

Totally underrated comment. You hit the nail on the head. I think Slashdot has a way of attracting desktop thinkers, which isn't a bad thing don't get me wrong on that point. However, I hear the same old stale arguments tossed out there about desktops every year and every year desktop sales erode just a little bit more. In my company, there are like ten to fifteen technical workers that use desktops to create online business reporting that hundreds of end users use on their iPads and Android tablets. The desktops are still there, we just need less of them because the mobile devices do 99% of the work for 90% of the employees. The crap like working with spreadsheets sent in and all of that crap, the company fired those folks because they figured out that they could automate all that crap with advanced ETL tools. What used to be Word documents that held all our company processes, has changed into someone from the engineering department passing a BPMN document into an online processor and it spitting out technical documents that people on the floor modify using their tablets. I'd say about 80% of the technical documentation is now written by a computer, the other 20% is done on a tablet. Presentations are pretty much take a bunch of photos from your phone, some charts and data taken from the BI reporting tool, and about 100 or less words dictated to the iPad, and boom you've got your quarterly meeting presentation. Again, majority of the information comes from a machine and the small amount of actual work to be done a desktop is forty billion times over qualified.

So for the guy above you who thinks all this stuff is so far off. This is something that happens today because the majority of actual work isn't done by humans anyway. The stuff doesn't have to be more capable because we fired those people who required that and automated their job. We don't need more software, sheer numbers is just a dumb figure. We don't care about usability, pretty much everything is just a computer talking to a computer, we just need to see the end result, and the people who maintain the two systems talking to each other, we need at most like three of them. Desktops are not dead and they aren't going to die off completely, but we need way fewer of them now and that trend is only going to increase.

Re:What, no Clippy?

[BitZtream]

Photoshop - Does anyone "really" run this on Windows?! I thought that was mostly a Mac thing, but whatever, I'll give that one to you.

No one runs it on OS X anymore either. Sure there are probably a few firms that still have some copies in use because they have old graphics designers that are incapable of moving to something else. For low to not ultra-heavy work, theres pixelmator which does everything that the various versions of photoshop due (excluding the medical edition of photoshop) and for the very high end side there are multiple photoshop replacements.

Photoshop once ruled supreme, today, after everything Adobe has done to it in the last say 5 years ... its irrelevant.