Project Astoria will not be in the next Windows Phone version.
“We’re committed to offering developers many options to bring their apps to the Windows Platform, including bridges available now for Web and iOS, and soon Win32. The Astoria bridge is not ready yet, but other tools offer great options for developers. For example, the iOS bridge enables developers to write a native Windows Universal app which calls UWP APIs directly from Objective-C, and to mix and match UWP and iOS concepts such as XAML and UIKit. Developers can write apps that run on all Windows 10 devices and take advantage of native Windows features easily. We’re grateful to the feedback from the development community and look forward to supporting them as they develop apps for Windows 10.”
I immediately had this picture in my mind: MS and Apple high five each other and Android is standing next to them crying.
Hehe, well – how many Android phones per Windows phone? Android is not the one with a shortage of apps.
Lars Fosdal Fair enough. So replace the crying with sticking the tongue out to those other 2 :p
/sub
Unfortunately Astoria was the vehicle for Embarcadero to bring Delphi apps to Windows mobile. So it looks like we’ll have to wait a little longer until we will be able to publish Delphi apps for Windows phones.
But I’m OK with that. Let Astoria rest in peace and provide direct support for Windows mobile/UWP whenever you are ready, Embarcadero.
Yes, we were considering this as an interesting way to support the platform. It offered a direct compatibility, but also a migration path supporting specific and unique Windows Phone. And my impression using it was that performance wasn’t that bad.
I’m not sure how much this was a technical decision, and how much they want customer to rebuild for WinRT rather than just providing a compatibility layer (so more of a “political” decision) .
Some of the articles I read today about this topic, including the one linked about, fall short explaining the difference between the iOS and Android bridge. They are totally unrelated, from a technical point of view. It is not a matter of iOS vs. Android. It is a matter of recompiling from source with a new compiler and linker (and compatible API layers) or running an executable as is.
If the goal is to have more apps for the platform, the latter is significantly more interesting. I guess Microsoft decided that it is better to have more developers for the platforms, than more apps. Only time will tell if they took the right decision.
As for Embarcadero, we are back to evaluating the effort of full native support, see if we can partially leverage this Objective-C compatibility layer (as this provides an API bridge), or have to go with full winRT and how. We’ll keep an eye on Windows phone platform penetration, right now it seems stuck at its 3% of the market.
Marco Cantù It will be hard to convince Windows developers to go the way via iOS for addressing the WinRT market – especially if this would require having a Mac for initial testing and debugging.
I see many of our clients switching to Windows phones (giving reasons like better price, safety, lifetime, remote management) – even in companies where I expected that having an iPhone would be a question of proper status representation. So the 3% market share might be true for the total market – but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is already higher if you only look at the enterprise market.
Just let me know asap when you start targeting the WinRT market. I’ll sign whatever NDA is required, to get involved. 🙂
The point is not getting Windows developers build apps for Windows Phone. The problem Microsoft has is getting at least a fraction of the overall mobile developer community and consumer and games apps developers target their phone.
> I see many of our clients switching to Windows phones
If this happens at a larger scale, we’ll have to reconsider our priorities. I know some people have a Windows phone plus a real phone 😉 Right now that 3% is mostly made if the lowest level Lumia phone, people get free with contracts (I know this is the case in Italy, where Microsoft is actually around 10%!)
I got a windows phone here…was a promotional cheap bundle
and its fast
and I have used MS VS Community 2015….which is free for an individual developer..and I have created a simple app that works on windows phone 8 (and I have created a universal app) using C#
there are not many components available though ! 😉
Brian Hamilton Most of the major .Net component developers do have Universal Windows Platform components. Take a look at SyncFusion (http://www.syncfusion.com), they have a community license of their Enterprise Studio for free and that includes the Universal Windows Platform(UWP) components.
“…doesn’t deny that the Android bridge is dead, though it also doesn’t confirm it’s alive. It’s “not ready yet”…”
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-may-have-detonated-its-android-on-windows-phone-bridge/
Wanted dead or alive (: