Build 2015 and that Android/iOS Announcement

So here I am sat in the dining hall area of the Moscone centre in San Francisco nearing the finish line of another Build conference.

As is always the case with being a Microsoft developer, its been a crazy rollercoaster of Microsoft’s future vision as a company, some really cool tech all mixed in with with a dash of discovery and a few guessing games.

One of the biggest announcements made on Day 1 was that Windows 10 can now run apps that were originally written for Android/iOS/cocoa based devices.

With reasonably little effort, the code base can be reworked into a Visual Studio solution, be rebuilt and deployed to the Windows Store.

When hearing this and watching the demos on stage, a few things ran through my mind.

Game over dudes, No point being a Windows Phone developer any more as clients will just hire an iOS/Android guy, target that platform and then port to WP after.
The platform is literally running Uikit and the Android libraries directly on Windows - That’s a herculean engineering feat that I am still struggling to comprehend it as I write this.
All the stuff about Modern UI, Windows Phone look and feel etc will be gone as the platform will now run all three app types.
At the end of the day, the normal users are going to win as Windows will run everything.

It’s fair to say I spent the rest of day 1 with my head in my hands, posting passive aggressive tweets (sorry about that) with the other guys I’m here with saying that I was being no fun to hang out with.

Then I slept on it, felt a little bit better and hit the Day 2 keynote. Here they went through in a bit more detail how the code porting is going to work, but for existing windows developers the situation still looked a bit bleak.

Then the magic happened. I spent most of day 2 talking to as many people as I could about this, including few of the Microsoft guys who work within the Operating Systems division for a few hours over lunch, and the engineers working on these porting platforms. Here are a few bits which I think you will find interesting.

Sidebar - Obviously i’m just a random guy at the conference, please take all of this with a pinch of salt as i’m writing it from memory and it’s 100% my interpretation. Stuff may be wrong and I would be mortified to hear that you are making any mission critical decisions of of it

The Objective C / Java port essentially runs the apps in a virtualised environment and not everything is supported. Your basic data snacking apps will work but anything more funky will need a significant amount of rework or just won’t work at all
It’s a like for like device port. An iOS/Android app can only be ported to Windows Phone and a Cocoa app can only be ported to Windows Desktop. That’s it
The preview is still a few months away, and even then, when it finally get’s released, it’s going to take a while to mature. There is plenty of time to react to this any maybe pick-up objective-C if you want to learn it.
The idea behind this is to bring these other platform developers with existing codebases into the Windows game, let them see how cool it is and then hopefully invest in a more native solution. The idea is not to think of WP as an after thought (which is still the current thought process of many companies today)
Existing Windows Developers now find themselves in a market that spans quite a few device types - Laptops, Phones, Tablets, Hololens, IoT etc, and Microsoft have even started touting a number of 1 billion devices over the next few years. I see this as how we will now market ourselves, as developers who can deliver awesome experiences across all these device families using the Universal app platform.

That’s my 2 cents. Right now i’m feeling good about this and It’s going to be interesting to see how it pans out.

To quote one of the guys I spoke to - “All we have done is just asked the bouncers to lighten up a bit and let a few more people into the party”.