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Comment by badlogic | Hacker News Reader

It's weird that this isn't the biggest news out of all the announcements today. Seems like an Electron fork is more interesting.

Having Android APKs work unmodified (minus Google APIs) is pretty neat, but has been done before (BB, Jola).

The real interesting part is the the Objective-C toolchain. Seems like they have an emulation layer for UIKit, Foundation and other frameworks. Probably hard for them to keep up with changes and I expect a lot of growing pains for early adopters.

Great news overall, I can finally add a proper Windows Phone/10 target for libGDX. Makes RoboVM more versatile as well :D

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I think the idea of having new frameworks being built upon the cross-platform layers now present in all the competing vendors, is really the most viable way forward.

Instead of using one particular platforms' GUI framework - use only that which is common among each vendor, and fill in the missing with single-language, multi-target code, i.e. write once, truly run everywhere.

So that's why I'm putting energy into things like libGDX and MOAI as a developer - the host-build-is-the-OS ethos really seems like the way out of this big mess that Microsoft has now made. ;)

A windows universal app target for libgdx would indeed be awesome

This is gonna happen as soon as the tools are publically available :)

I'm confused now. I didn't think this announcement was to allow apks install on Windows 10. Simple ask: Will you be able to download the Amazon App Store apk from the handset's browser, install, and run the app?

No it seems like a developer have to integrate with Project Astoria some how to replace the Google APIs with the Microsoft ones and then submit the app to the store. I doubt end users will have access to that capability.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/04/29/mic...

That's not what Arstechnica is saying (regarding the recompile - they just need to publish to the store):

"Unlike Islandwood, which will require developers themselves to recompile their software to bring it to Windows, Astoria will in principle work with any old APK, without requiring the developer to do anything but publish the app in the store—as long as the APK sticks to the APIs that Astoria will provide."

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