Cade Metz for Wired on Microsoft’s vision for Windows 10 to be on a billion devices and for applications from Android, iOS, and Windows all running on them “easily”:
But this kind of thing is never as easy as it seems. “I’m skeptical of anything that pretends to be the magic bullet,” says one coder, who requested anonymity because he works closely with Windows. In many cases, coders must manually modify their apps so that they run on disparate devices (these devices, after all, are quite different). And even if Microsoft’s tools provide an onramp to all Windows devices that’s as simple as promised, that’s no guarantee that coders will actually use them to build apps for things like Windows phones or Hololens—particularly if these coders are already focused on other operating systems.
What Microsoft showed at Build is obviously not the best way to build an application for Windows. However, for now, for today, to get up-and-running, it may be the quickest way to get something on Windows so that you’re able to support the new Windows 10 users.
I hope developers port their apps to Windows 10 using Microsoft’s toolset to do so and then go back and rethink them from the beginning if they get any traction there.
