A couple of weeks ago, Joe Belfiore confirmed that Microsoft is not “focusing” on Windows 10 Mobile anymore, essentially giving up the whole phone strategy of Microsoft. While Redmond is not officially retiring the platform, Belfiore told us that there will be no new features and no new devices, suggesting to switch to competing platforms. I almost instantly commented that it is a huge error made by Microsoft that had and has the resources to run a niche mobile platform while it waits for “the new generation of mobile devices”, as they call it.
The first casualty of that error could be the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) framework that promised to help developers to design applications for “any form factor” Windows 10 was running onto. However, with the retirement of Windows 10 Mobile and without any viable alternative for the smartphone-sized form factor, what would the word “any” mean ? While the UWP platform also includes Xboxes, IoT and holographic devices (Hololens and compatible devices), it is easy to understand that the big share of devices that could be interested in UWP apps were the desktop+mobile ones.
Xboxes, holographic and especially IoT devices for sure will feature a completely different class of apps and it will be not so common to have UWP software running the very same application on IoT devices AND desktop ones. Sure, Spotify could be useful on Xbox but since .NET is the common development framework for both Win32 and UWP there’s already a baseline of code that could be shared across the different versions of Windows-based applications and Win32 recently had access to the UWP-specific APIs too.
Xboxes, holographic and especially IoT devices for sure will feature a completely different class of apps and it will be not so common to have UWP software running the very same application on IoT devices AND desktop ones.
No-one was thinking that Win32 was going anywhere soon because Microsoft is sane and it will not cut the tie to hundreds of millions of applications just to turn itself into a new OS X but the fact that Win32 will come to ARM devices, in my opinion, makes even less important to dig into UWP ecosystem. The very fact that Microsoft not only ensured to move the Win32 ecosystem onto the boat of ARM devices but also ensured that such apps could be packaged for the store and also enabled its access to UWP APIs means that the adoption of that universal platform is not moving as fast as initially expected.
While there could be some technical reasons for that, the main point here is just that the mobile demise made less important to switch to a somewhat limited and entire new platform just to create apps that would run on desktops anyway. .NET standard 2.0 that has been recently released will help put UWP apps on par with .NET framework ones but it’s difficult to understand whom such apps are aimed to now that mobile is no more.
Don’t get me wrong: I [...]