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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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I worked selling cellphones when Windows Phone was trying to compete. Their failure was lack of apps. From what I understand, it was difficult to port apps from Android or iOS to Windows Phone OS. It's a shame because the user experience was bar none. Hell, I installed a Windows OS theme on my Android for years. I still think they could make a comeback if they made an actual, honest to God Windows Phone that ran all Windows apps.
Xamarin was supposed to solve this. They even bought the fucking company.
I don't remember that. What is Xamarin?
It's a cross platform UI framework using C#/.NET, mostly cross-mobile-platform, although technically it could make Windows desktop UIs too.
They now spruke .NET MAUI (Multi-Platform App UI) as the new "write once, deploy everywhere" framework. I've not used it but it sounds good in theory 🤷♂️
It's very powerful. It's great for making desktop apps too if you're more used to using html and css for UI (if you use the Hybrid version - the standard uses XML exactly like Xamarin I believe). The only downfall it has at the moment is that it should also allow web deployment as a webapp too then it could be a true one and done framework.
You can get around it a bit by putting the pages into a library instead and have both a MAUI project and a Web so project that uses the same pages, just with different setups.
Ok now explain it for those of us who went to community college
It’s a thing programmers use to make apps on iOS, android, and (previously) windows phone. It lets you use Microsoft’s words to translate into word that can be understood by iOS and android.
Basically, if you're going to develop an app for different platforms (iPhone, Android, Windows desktop, etc), you usually have to have some/all of your code be specific to that platform. In some cases it may even have to be in different programming languages.
Xamarin is an attempt to let developers write code in one language (Microsoft's C# language), with one common set of code that can then be installed on many different platforms.
In reality, it's a little more complicated than that... but that's the goal.
Supposedly they eventually got android apps to run on windows phone directly, the app devs would only need to publish their Android app to wp. But if they actually got that far they never released such an option.
I've heard that the tech they got from developing this Android app support eventually turned into the WSL system on windows (the windows feature that let's you run a Linux kernel/terminal and subsequently, Linux programs)
Must've been WSL1 which they eventually abandoned. Trying to reimplement all the Linux syscalls on top of the Windows kernel was always going to be a neverending game of catch up.
WSL2 they just run an actual Linux kernel within Hyper-V
I used an Xperial back in high school too, it was better the Android and iOS in every way except the number of apps
Same on the Windows OS theme 😊
I think this is a reason the Zune touch did poorly too.
Zune was not especially great in terms of what it could do, true, but the hardware was also shit. Also, the first gen Zunes all bricked at one point due to some programming error.
I could've sworn the Zune HD's specs were better than the current gen iPod touch.
If they wanted to compete today, they'd fork Android in a similar fashion to how Edge moved to Chromium.