Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform app dream is dead and buried | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform app dream is dead and buried

theverge.com

20 pointsdoener5 comments

Open articleView on HN

Nope,

WinUI roadmap

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/master/d...

React Native for Windows rewrite on top of WinUI

https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows

Announcement done during last month's BUILD.

UWP is live and well as Win32's successor.

One of the big problems was UWP's cross-platform approach was too narrow. The problem isn't writing across all Microsoft platforms, the problem is writing across all platforms, such as iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, etc. Platforms like Ionic solve those problems; UWP does not.

Not to mention how it was basically a more restricted WPF (which already is an over-engineered, confusing mess)

Agreed. There is Uno [0], which tries to bring UWP to other platforms. I think MS would be smart to apply the Xamarin move on them.

[0]: https://platform.uno/

I think Microsoft would argue that Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms are already respectably competitive on that front. Particularly because they see the focus on Native controls plus XAML as being kin to the React Native approach (Native controls plus JSX).

From a design standpoint they have been working to merge their Fabric design system (started by the Office team and originally focused on web, then React, but now with a bunch of Fabric UI Native controls especially for React Native and Xamarin) with their UWP design work (Fluent Design System 2.0 and the WinUI controls library). That merger in progress is working to sell Fluent Design as a cross-platform design system that feels native on each platform (adapting to be more Material Design-like on Android, and more Apple-design like on iOS), but also coherent (and brandable) across platforms (since many users use multiple platforms each day).

It's an interesting strategy, and maybe even a great idea to have a cross-platform design system focusing particularly on stuff that matters (accessibility is huge focus area for Fluent Design), and with Office seemingly all in on this strategy it may even have weight to it. It's also something that potentially complements the Xamarin and React Native approach well, of adapting to native components and feel as much as possible, but trying to leverage as much high level similarity as possible as well.

Which also is to point out that UWP is sort of expanding into cross-platform almost directly with the increased communication/sharing between the WinUI controls library team and the Fabric UI teams. Which also seems to underscore how wrong the article is here in that UWP isn't dead, it's just evolving, including going more cross-platform, getting better at running on more versions of Windows (instead of being tied to specific versions of Windows, new changes are increasingly moving to NuGet package updates, especially with the upcoming WinUI 3.0 moving almost the full UWP rendering stack into Open Source C++ libraries rather than baked into Windows), and working in many more scenarios (plug UWP/WinUI controls into an old WinForms app or an old MFC app with no problems, mix and match to your ancient app's needs).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com