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]
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