Microsoft Universal Apps & Continuum: Why Did Microsoft Not Squeeze their Potential?

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Microsoft is one company that has hands on many, many things. To an extent, this has worked for them, but then, on some other fronts they have failed so woefully. The list of failed projects from Microsoft are endless, only rivaled by Google’s — on PC, mobile, and the list of failed startups under their belt

Its no longer news that Microsoft wants to dominate the mobile space just as they do on the PC/Desktop world, starting with Windows Phone 6.5, which was fairly good, then the horrible experience on the Windows Phone 7. Despite the annoying trend of no-forward-compatibility, things got better with the next iteration, Windows Phone 8. I used a few Windows Phone 8 devices, and was truly impressed by their performance, coupled with the very good camera experience.

With the coming of Windows 10, some of the attractive selling points Microsoft brought to the table were Universal Windows Apps and Continuum. These two ideas are brilliant but not fully realized; we’ll look at them briefly before highlighting what it could be missing.

The Universal Apps Conundrum

The idea behind Universal Apps was to give users a similar experience across all their devices, be it on a PC, tablet or on a phone. It was to offer one app package and one app store to go across the board. Brilliant! Right…? This was also extended to bringing in apps from other platforms. Last year, Microsoft unveiled porting tools for converting apps from other ecosystems to be supported on the Windows 10 platform. Below are the four porting tools that were to be made available to developers:

Project Westminster – to port Web apps

– to port Web apps Project Centennial – to port Classic Win32 apps

– to port Classic Win32 apps Project Islandwood – to port iOS apps

– to port iOS apps Project Astoria – to emulate Android apps.

This news brought joy to almost everyone that heard it. Personally, I finally found a reason to invest in a Windows phone. So far so good, but we haven’t seen or heard of these new ideas come into full fruition. For the Universal Apps project, developers are gradually porting their apps to support the cause, but there is still a very long way to go.

I was heavily disappointed after hearing news that Microsoft has discontinued Project Astoria. It appears, somewhere along the line, Android app support was disabled in the Insider builds of Windows 10 mobile… Sad really. We’ve heard some encouraging news and developments with Project Islandwood (iOS app porting) but so far, nothing serious has come out of it.