Windows Phone Developers: Just Let It Go | Hacker News Reader

Windows Phone Developers: Just Let It Go

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29 pointsductionist24 comments

I'm an ex hobbyist Windows Phone developer and I have no plan to port any of my applications to UWP.

First because I don't like Windows 10 itself: its UI, the Store, the builtin ads, the forced updates, the invasive telemetry. Should the LTSB edition be available to anyone I would use it, but the Pro edition is a no go.

Secondly because I don't like the closeness of UWP. Silverlight was a good platform in my opinion because its runs apps out-of-browser on various editions of Windows and Mac OS. UWP apps on the other side doesn't even run on the most deployed edition of Windows!

Finally because I didn't have enough trust in Microsoft on the consumer side. Since the launch of WP7 Microsoft consistently breaks its promises and the expectations of its users and developers base. It doesn't motivate me to invest time to learn APIs and a framework that will be ditched for another one in a few years for no obvious reason.

However I still like a lot C# and F#. I'm building & experimenting with Xamarin for front-end applications. MonoGame is portable solution for games but there is no portable UI framework for application. And the investment in UWP is in the total opposite direction of providing or supporting from Microsoft.

«Secondly because I don't like the closeness of UWP. Silverlight was a good platform in my opinion because its runs apps out-of-browser on various editions of Windows and Mac OS. UWP apps on the other side doesn't even run on the most deployed edition of Windows!»

If it helps, Microsoft's Xamarin team announced macOS, Linux, and WPF (Windows 7+) support for Xamarin.Forms (expanding it to full desktop support beyond just Android and iOS mobile support). Admittedly, Xamarin.Forms is a subset of the full UWP, but it hopefully should with XAML Standard 1.0 alignment converge to be more of a proper subset of UWP than Silverlight ever was for WPF.

These enhancements to Xamarin.Forms and the development of the XAML Standard 1.0 are all in open source development on GitHub.

LTSB don't even have the Windows Store

"the Store is booming on the desktop...The half-billion desktop Windows 10 users are eventually going to turn in to a half-billion desktop Store users, and it’s going to happen faster than anyone thinks"

This seems remarkably optimistic and entirely at odds with Microsoft's history with this sort of initiative.

They don't have a great track record, but so far it seems to be working out this time - our indie apps get about one million downloads per month from the Store, and 95% of those are on desktop. If Microsoft can get more household name apps (like iTunes) into their store then I think it'll happen. Windows 10 S will help too.

Could I ask what apps they are? A million a month is a remarkable number for a store where a heavily featured app (the Fitbit app) has five reviews worldwide, and where I can't find a single app with more than triple digit reviews.

All indications right now is that the Store remains a disaster. This could be an uninformed assessment (for instance maybe reviews are not made intuitive, etc), but if there is alternative information I'd love to hear it.

The Windows desktop right now seems....stratified and solidified. People know what they run on their desktop and on the new install they install Chrome, Office, 7zip, etc, and that's it. There seems to be very little interest in discovery of new options.

You’re right next door to a platform that Microsoft is pushing hard, that users actually like, and is a huge blue ocean of opportunity for indie developers — for now.

Isn't that exactly the same pitch as the one Microsoft gave these developers back in 2011-12? I don't blame them if they decide not to buy it this time around.

I think the opportunity is definitely there.

The problem is the Microsoft has been changing their mind so many times about technical things (remember silverlight? or XNA? How about hardware support for WP7.8? WP8.1? W10 before creators update?) that a lot of developers just left the platform in anger and Microsoft now has to attract new developers.

The attitude in this blog post is exactly the kind of attitude that drives users and developers away. Ramming the Store down desktop users throats isn't exactly customer focused.

There's definitely pushback on Microsoft from users who don't want the Store. But how would Microsoft making the Store more widely-used push away developers?

Helping porters of your opensource project to a platform is counterproductive if it will have a marketplace with commercial participants encouraging cost barriers to entry.

Most customers the store is targeted probably appreciate the store.

You are pro user, so you value freedom. Normal users want safety and convience.

As a Windows and Windows Phone user, this is my take:

Pro users and normal users both want convenience. For pro users, key shortcuts and cli serves this purpose.

Take the chrome store for example. It's light-ish and loads pretty fast. It's very easy to download, store and distribute chrome extensions.

The same cannot be said for the Windows Store. It inherits and extends every problem windows update. (Spits random errors that make no sense to normal users: error 0x239akd. The date on the machine, country setting, language setting can trigger errors.)

The store is SLOW unless you're using broadband. Microsoft has made it virtually impossible to download, store and distribute store apps.

With desktop apps, I can download the exe file on my work computer and install on my home computer - not possible with store apps.

Originally, the windows store a font 9px download link hidden at the bottom. I once downloaded a 2GB game from the store only to get home and it refused to install.

Summary: Microsoft has built several walls around their marketplace but are confused as to why people aren't rushing in.

Appx sideloading has gotten much, much better since the Windows 10 Anniversary update. Copy a signed appx file to a machine, double click, and you get a nice, simple installer dialog. As easy, if not easier (no UAC prompt, for instance), than double clicking an EXE or MSI file.

Yes, it might be nice if the Windows Store made it easier to get Appx files for apps for scenarios like "download at work and install at home".

(Though I think Microsoft's current focus is more on the side of "tell my machine at home to go ahead and download the app while I'm at work" scenarios, between Xbox already prioritizing that and some of the things they are working on with "Project Rome"/the Microsoft Graph.)

I'm literally working on a Windows Phone 8 app this instant. I took five mins out to check HN.

I agree with the sentiment though - UWP is the way to go

You're an endangered species ;) Why are you still working on a Winphone 8 app if I may ask?

Purely for my own use. My primary phone is a wp8.1 handset. I want to replace OneNote with an app that uses text files on dropbox as a datastore. That way I can write on the phone and pick it up later on the desktop like I can with one note, but also not worry about vendor lock in

OneNote had a week long outage on wp8/.1 earlier this year. MS were slow to fix because wp8 is no longer supported. In fact I believe it only got fixed because it also affected xbox logins somehow. I'm moving away from OneNote because of that, but I like my old Lumia

I've upgraded my unsupported Ativ S to Windows 10 Mobile.

how did that go?

Took long time to do it right. Camera doesn't focus and minimal brightness turns screen off (which is nearly impossible to restore). Those are the only problems thought.

Is it possible to target Windows Phone 8 with UWP ?

No. UWP is windows phone 10 only. However on practice the core code had not changed massively. UWP also won't work on Windows 8 or 8.1. I have a moderately successful win 8 app which I'm updating to UWP. It's taking forever though. I keep rewriting and refactoring as i learn better ways to do things. I need a kick up the ass to get launched

So about UWP: Browsing the Microsoft website, I see that you can develop in C++. But can you do OpenGL apps with UWP? Or is Direct3D the only way to do 3D for the UWP platform? If it is, it kinda makes porting from Android/iOS/Linux to UWP too hard to be practical.

Looks like there is a project template for it: http://developernote.com/2015/11/combining-opengl-and-xaml-t...

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