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Yesterday, we heard about Microsoft’s plans to get Android apps to run on Windows 10. We likened the idea to Blackberry’s Android runtime used on their latest devices that allows Android developers to easily port their apps over.
Well, the news was true, but only to a degree. Microsoft has equipped developers with tools to easily port their Android and iOS apps to Windows 10, only this is no mere emulation or runtime. Instead, it’s a custom platform called Astoria that opens up Windows 10 development to a number of new languages.
For Android, developers can now code directly in C++ and Java to make sure they don’t have to write entirely new code bases from scratch. iOS developers will also be treated to support for Objective-C. Microsoft will make it extremely easy for developers to get comfortable developing for Windows using this SDK.
There are a couple of hurdles to consider, though you can be sure Microsoft was mindful about them. Namely, they recognize that not all developers can fully port their code base to Windows 10 without the help of some of Google’s proprietary services and APIs.
Microsoft says it’s their goal to build many of these types of services and tools themselves to fill in some of those gaps. It’s not all that dissimilar to Amazon and their Kindle Fire devices. While apps can be ported over to those devices in native fashion, Amazon still had to create their own APIs and platforms to fill in for the missing Google bits.
Whether this is going to be enough to fix Microsoft’s apps problem is still up in the air, but at least they’ve gone about trying to fix it it in a very creative, sensible and — honestly — exciting way. We hope to learn more soon.
[via The Verge]
It’s not the languages – it’s the APIs that make or break app development.
And given that I think that most Windows apps sort of run on Windows, I’m going to say that the title on this is more than fair enough! :D :D :D
Extend, Embrace , Extinguish has been ms mantra for 20 years it happened with Sybase, Firefox, word perfect, Borland etc etc.. keeping oems hostage with pure monopoly ms is pure evil empire with 95% desktop market share. History will not repeat here windoze was is always a bsod pos.
‘History will not repeat here windoze was is always a bsod pos’
By that comment, I assume you’re either trolling or haven’t used the OS since Windows 2000 was released.
my windows 7 work laptop is a useless pile of bits – bsod about once a week, arbitrary system processes chewing up disk i/o all day every day (perfmon reports 26,000ms+ response time for many apps on a regular basis; haven’t seen it spike much higher than that though).
thankfully i don’t use windows for any of my REAL work (i’m in the semiconductor industry and the “real” tools for my trade don’t even exist for the windows platform; windows is just the think i use to write documentation or remotely connect to my linux workstation)
microsoft’s old Embrace, Extend, Extinguish mantra is, however, a perfectly valid (albeit evil) business tactic and one would be foolish not to see the potential for this to be just such an attempt.
in the end @androidscales is very well justified in observing the potential for this to be a rebirth of Gates’ old business tactics. I’d be shocked and possibly disappointed if that weren’t the case (though i desperately do NOT want the tactic to succeed – kill android to save microsoft would be a horrible end result). windows is STILL a heaping pile of junk – in fact i much preferred Win2k over Win7 (and no, i haven’t tried Win8 or Win10 yet).
Never had any of the issues you speak of on any machine, unless the hardware was acting funky. What kind of laptop do you have? Sounds like the equivalent of one of those $100 drug store Android tablets.
He probably bought a bargain bin PC at Walmart. I build my own PC’s with quality parts and never had a single problem on windows 8.
corporate purchasing program: it’s a Dell. I didn’t go buy it myself – I’m not self employed.
(oh and windows 8? I’m on win 7 still. doesn’t matter, this issue has plagued windows for decades)
it’s a Dell. I had my pick from 2 machines via the corporate purchasing site.
it’s not a hardware issue. I boot Ubuntu from a thumb drive for personal work in the same machine and it’s both stable and fast. the issue is windows. period.
I’m a computer engineer by profession and education; I design microprocessors for a living. this is not a hardware problem and if it were I’d have fixed it by now.
So if I run Ubuntu (or any flavor of Linux) on any machine that Windows 8 runs flawlessly on and have trouble with it, I can write Linux off as a shitty OS?
no, but you CAN say it is definitely not the HARDWARE at fault.
now if the machine CAME with Ubuntu (that is, it shipped with Ubuntu from the manufacturer and therefore the drivers/etc were expected to work properly) and ran horribly, but then installing Windows made everything happy again, then yes – i’d say you’ve duplicated the scenario here and could equally well claim that Ubuntu is a steaming pile of cow dung.
i owned a “screwdriver shop” from 1997 to 2000; i sold the shop and went to work for a local competitor from 2000 to 2003. during those 6 years i fixed windows for a living. sure my job description had all sorts of other stuff in there (including support for local businesses running various flavors of *nix) but my day to day grind was facing the slippery slope of Windows’ inevitable and brittle decline in functionality. over and over and over again. when i got out of that industry (end of 2003) and went to school for engineering my main motivation was to get away from facing a dozen broken windows installs every single day.
and that worked. now i just face one broken windows install and it’s not every day but rather just those days i need to boot windows for some menial component of my job. it’s entirely out of band from my actual REAL work (CAD vendors for my industry don’t even target windows so I couldn’t do my work on windows even if i wanted to).
windows is broken all the same, though. and i have no doubt that were i to reimage my existing machine it would run GREAT for a year or so before crumbling under the ever growing strain resulting from the poor design of the OS.
i stick to my guns on this: windows is a steaming pile of dung. i’ve observed the EXACT same phenomenon on dozens of my own computers over the years and HUNDREDS (thousands?) of customer computers back when i was a screwdriver monkey.
Maybe not a “hardware” problem per-se… But possibly a DRIVER problem.
You should definitely consider 8 & 10. I use 8 at work and it’s actually functional. 7 wasn’t that bad, and I use it for both work and home. But that’s a whole separate market we’re talking about.
I could see this conspiracy as a possibility, but honestly I think they just want their mobile OS to live and not die in the shadows.
Well so does Linux on desktop which is 100 times Superior than bsod windoze but m$ paid trolls hates it , ms never ported office to Linux . talk about double standard
of I had the rights I would update to 8 or 10.
there is no conspiracy here; embrace, extend, extinguish is a business tactic. it’s valid and not even unique to Microsoft. it’s evil no matter what company does it but businesses tend to accept some amount of evil in their strategies.
I meant in terms of giving it a chance in general, we won’t be updating to 10 even though we just got the Surface Pro 3s.
I saw one of your replies said you have a Dell…. It’s a Dell, it needs no other reason, Dell blows.
Why would you keep Windows on it to write documentation or connect to your work box? Shouldn’t you have just wiped it and installed Linux immediately when you got the machine and saved everyone including yourself a whole lot of complaining? Sounds like there is a reason that you use Windows but you just like to moan a lot… You don’t make sense…
corporate policy: only windows machines have access to the corporate VPN. in a 10k+ employee company I am unlikely affect change in this policy.
that’s it. that’s the reason.
I sometimes go weeks without booting my windows box bit when I am forced to use it (e.g. to work from home when a project is close to tapping out) you be better believe I whine about it. we all do. windows makes every second of working remotely more painful.
I sometimes drive in to the office at 3am on a weekend night just to get 10 minutes of work done in 10 minutes rather than the hour it would take as I battle windows issues.
to be fair my laptop is 3 years old now and corporate policy would allow me to replace it. also IT would be happy to reimage it. I do need to do one of these two things. my Linux box is the same age and had no such problems, of course, since it isn’t windows. that’s the point. windows deteriorates quickly and consistently for no valid reason. I.e.windows sucks.
FYI: My Windows 7 box runs pretty much flawlessly. It’s mostly a gamer, with occasional VPN connectivity (My company isn’t as stick in the mud about this… the Windows box in question is mine, and my corporate laptop is Redhat). There’s a good chance that you don’t have a very well tuned box. It also could well be a short between the keyboard and chair somewhere. (Not necessarily you. I’m actually thinking of whoever created the corporate image)
Go back and recompile your kernel. Geez…
BURRRRRNNNNN!!!!!
This is fantastic news. Windows might finally get a decent podcatcher if one of the Android or iOS devs would port theirs :P
I like this. I recently got an HP Stream 7, a 7″ tablet running full Windows 8.1, so if I get the update to 10, if be able to pretty much retire my Galaxy Tab 2. I have no issues with Windows, I have the tablet and a laptop running 8.1, works fine for me.
Awesome. Just got a sweat deal on a Surface Pro 3, so I hope PowerAmp is usable on it! It’s by far my favorite music player, even if it doesn’t have Sync like double twist.
Lol one question
What’s a sweat deal
I’ve heard of sweet deals but never a deal that sweats
Lol no hate just having fun
Seconded.
I’d rather it just run Android apps straight up and Google to make the APIs work for Windows. Both platforms would probably sell more of that were the case.
things like this,and headlines like “Your Windows 10 phone can turn into a full PC” is gonna make things really interesting. modern flagships have as good if not better hardware then computers. would be nice to see them treated that way.
A step in the right direction.