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Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

I think you misunderstood. The universal app runs on both windows desktop and windows phone. So they would only need to be incentivized to want their app on windows desktops, and then it's automatically on win phone for free.

If that works, it makes more sense to me than emulating or porting android apps. Those ideas will never work, as MS probably found out with the canceled Astoria project. It's a great sounding strategy, but that kind of technology isn't practical for many reasons. Just look at all of the issues that wine has trying to go the opposite direction on Linux.

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This is true ("universal apps runs on both windows desktop and windows phone").

But the problem is, for most mobile apps it doesn't make any sense to 'run on a desktop'. So MS huge desktop marketshare doesn't cancel out their tiny mobile marketshare.

> So they would only need to be incentivized to want their app on windows desktops, and then it's automatically on win phone for free.

On Windows desktops in Metro, though. That's a little bit different of a value proposition when WPF and other toolkits do still exist outside of it.

I can see why you might want to share some libraries between a phone and desktop app but running the same app on both platforms makes no sense at all to me.

Then you have the problem that universal apps have to be sold through the app store which has all the problems of the Mac app store except worse in every respect.

From my point of view, I find your statement bizarre.

    Universal Apps : Native :: Responsive Design : Web

Creating separate applications for mobile and desktop is analogous to the old-fashioned approach of creating a web site for desktop consumers and an entirely separate site for mobile users. Thankfully, with the advent of what we now call "responsive design" (which is admittedly poorly named; should have been "adaptive"), we no longer need to create two separate apps, but instead can tune the singular application's user interface to adapt to screen size.

Universal Apps work the same way, they adapt to screen size. And with the nearly continuous spectrum of screen sizes from phones to phablets to small tablets to large tablets to small desktop displays to large desktop displays, there's a great upside to using such an approach.

Have you seen how the new Outlook app adapts to the a full-size display using Continuum? It's pretty awesome.

Frankly, I'm not really sure why you wouldn't use that approach.

That said, I agree the app store model needs to be reconsidered by everyone.

There is little overlap between desktop and phone applications. Most phone applications are web applications in their non-phone form. Games being the exception. Microsoft needs to focus on the things they are good at and the competition isn't, productivity. Like Apple used to.

Astoria worked pretty well, though. The reason for its cancellation doesn't seem to be technical.

> So they would only need to be incentivized to want their app on windows desktops

They would need to want their apps on Windows 10 desktops. Which excludes for example nearly every corporate desktop now and probably most of them for many years to come.

Wine is going from windows to linux with only blackbox/binary access to Windows. Astoria was heavily making use of the Android source, wasn't it?

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