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Microsoft Makes It Easier to Bring Android and iOS Apps to Windows 10

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31–40 of 91 posts

Re: Microsoft Makes It Easier to Bring Android and iOS Apps to Windows 10

#31
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the strategy Blackberry tried. This is about making code portable, not compiled binaries.

Can you explain how that would help? Also, it appears that it is indeed about allowing compiled binaries to run unmodified. > Specifically, Windows Mobile (and yes, that's now officially the name for Windows on phones and sub-8 inch tablets) will include an Android runtime layer that'll let them run existing Android apps (both Java and C++) unmodified.... Astoria will in principle work with any old APK, without requi…

Apps get full access to Windows APIs. They don't get full access to Google Play APIs.

Re: Microsoft Makes It Easier to Bring Android and iOS Apps to Windows 10

#32
post #26

If this makes more people ignore Windows phone as a platform and just develop Android apps I'm all for it. Anything that hurts MS and their platforms gets a plus in my book. This looks like a nice step in the right (non-ms) direction.

As GNU lover I cannot understand this much of hate toward Microsoft , Why ? Microsoft is the only not spying on you , Google and NSA and every other big name does too.So if you want blame someone there is more name's applicable to blame ( like NSA , Government , Google and etc ) to blame than Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft Makes It Easier to Bring Android and iOS Apps to Windows 10

#33
post #32
post #26

If this makes more people ignore Windows phone as a platform and just develop Android apps I'm all for it. Anything that hurts MS and their platforms gets a plus in my book. This looks like a nice step in the right (non-ms) direction.

As GNU lover I cannot understand this much of hate toward Microsoft , Why ? Microsoft is the only not spying on you , Google and NSA and every other big name does too.So if you want blame someone there is more name's applicable to blame ( like NSA , Government , Google and etc ) to blame than Microsoft.

I'm guessing you were not around in the nineties and early twothousands when MS was screwing us (Open Source) over big time.

As for the spying bit; I don't believe that one iota. Of course they spy as much as everyone else, they just hide/spin/sell it better.

Re: Microsoft Makes It Easier to Bring Android and iOS Apps to Windows 10

#34
I wonder how UI accessibility for people with disabilities, e.g. blind people, is going to work for these ported apps. That is, will the UI of an ANdroid app ported to Windows Phone be as accessible as it was on Android, or as accessible as a native Windows Phone equivalent would be? Hopefully they didn't do this half-assed and ignore accessibility altogether.

Re: Microsoft Makes It Easier to Bring Android and iOS Apps to Windows 10

#35

This is the same strategy Blackberry tried, more or less, and I'm skeptical that it'll work out any better for Microsoft. It's nice enough in the short term, maybe -- Windows Phone users can get some subset of quickly-ported things -- but in the long-term it seems to doom Windows Phone to second-class status; why would you write a real, native Windows Phone app when you can just do a quick half-assed port of your And…

Blackberry tried to run Android apps directly on Blackberry. Microsoft is just giving you an easy way to migrate your apps. It's a different thing.

Re: Microsoft Makes It Easier to Bring Android and iOS Apps to Windows 10

#36
It's weird that this isn't the biggest news out of all the announcements today. Seems like an Electron fork is more interesting.

Having Android APKs work unmodified (minus Google APIs) is pretty neat, but has been done before (BB, Jola).

The real interesting part is the the Objective-C toolchain. Seems like they have an emulation layer for UIKit, Foundation and other frameworks. Probably hard for them to keep up with changes and I expect a lot of growing pains for early adopters.

Great news overall, I can finally add a proper Windows Phone/10 target for libGDX. Makes RoboVM more versatile as well :D

Re: Microsoft Makes It Easier to Bring Android and iOS Apps to Windows 10

#37

It's weird that this isn't the biggest news out of all the announcements today. Seems like an Electron fork is more interesting. Having Android APKs work unmodified (minus Google APIs) is pretty neat, but has been done before (BB, Jola). The real interesting part is the the Objective-C toolchain. Seems like they have an emulation layer for UIKit, Foundation and other frameworks. Probably hard for them to keep up with…

A windows universal app target for libgdx would indeed be awesome

Re: Microsoft Makes It Easier to Bring Android and iOS Apps to Windows 10

#38

This is the same strategy Blackberry tried, more or less, and I'm skeptical that it'll work out any better for Microsoft. It's nice enough in the short term, maybe -- Windows Phone users can get some subset of quickly-ported things -- but in the long-term it seems to doom Windows Phone to second-class status; why would you write a real, native Windows Phone app when you can just do a quick half-assed port of your And…

My understanding is that this is different from Blackberry's play because windows won't be running a vm of android, instead the code itself is now easily compilable in visual studio as a windows 10 apk.

Re: Microsoft Makes It Easier to Bring Android and iOS Apps to Windows 10

#39
post #32
post #26

If this makes more people ignore Windows phone as a platform and just develop Android apps I'm all for it. Anything that hurts MS and their platforms gets a plus in my book. This looks like a nice step in the right (non-ms) direction.

As GNU lover I cannot understand this much of hate toward Microsoft , Why ? Microsoft is the only not spying on you , Google and NSA and every other big name does too.So if you want blame someone there is more name's applicable to blame ( like NSA , Government , Google and etc ) to blame than Microsoft.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx

Re: Microsoft Makes It Easier to Bring Android and iOS Apps to Windows 10

#40
post #2

This is a brilliant move to make Windows 10 much more relevant. I really like some of my Android apps, but I want a Windows phone. Hopefully this will encourage apps like Automatic to move to Windows phone. I also wonder if this will affect Xamarin in a negative way.

If I build a native Android app using Xamarin and then take that code and compile it using Visual Studio to then run on Windows 10 will the Windows ecosystem collapse into itself like what happened to Ron Silver in TimeCop when JCVD pushed his present self into his future self?[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D01mdGW9-Zg

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