Make Your Windows App for the 1% | Hacker News Reader

Make Your Windows App for the 1%

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Author: Ben, CEO, User Camp

http://user.camp/

User Camp is dedicated to helping Windows Store developers succeed. You should follow us on Twitter.

Seems relevant. Not that it discredits his arguments necessarily, but it still seems relevant.

That's me! Happy to answer any questions.

I wrote this article to address a trend I'm seeing in the Windows Store, where developers aren't treating small format devices (like the beleaguered Windows 10 Mobile platform) properly, and to make the case for doing so even though the user numbers alone don't justify it.

Thanks for replying ! I actually love portable windows devices. The joys of just having your files accessible and having programs just run. I had forgotten how that feels. Just getting a cache of files onto a device with a simple copy and then working on them on the go. Compared with android, and especially apple it's such a relief. And I'm soooo tired of app stores with their crappy apps that never seem to do more than a parlor trick.

That said, I do think you should state any financial interest you have upfront.

What's your point? The article is about how to make existing Windows UWP apps work on mobile form factor displays and devices. It doesn't sell anything or attempt to persuade people to port their apps to Windows.

It's the classic content marketing approach of rehashing some a bunch of simple points in order to funnel readers into his "expert consultant" service.

All though in this case, it's got a good makeup job.

You're making it sound like that's a bad thing. Should we prefer articles written by people who are clueless in the area they're writing about?

> Should we prefer articles written by people who are clueless in the area they're writing about?

You're strawmaning here. It's an advertisement masquerading as an article to skirt HN guidelines.

Which HN guideline forbids or even suggests that advertisements should be frowned upon? HN is constantly filled up with advertisements. Changelogs are a good example of articles that don't even try to hide that they want you to use the product in question and have minimal benefit to non-users.

It violates the ethos of discussion.

It's okay to "advertise" your work, as long as you disclose your affiliations so readers are aware of possible biases.

Misleading readers (such as clickbait) goes against that.

I vaguely recall Microsoft (long ago) announcing that Android apps will at some point work on Windows Phone. Googling for e.g. 'android apps on windows phone' yields a number of pages that explain how to accomplish this, but does anyone have any first-hand experience? Does it work well? Do most apps seem to work?

It was present in some early previews but then removed and abandoned: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/micro.... It later turned into bash-on-windows since the Linux subsystem part worked much better than the Android layer on top of that.

http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/25/microsoft-kills-project-as...

Yep, it was called Project Astoria. Sadly, MS pulled the plug on it a little while ago.

The rumors are that it was cancelled because it actually worked too well. The original expectation was that devs had to do a little bit of work to make the app(s) work on Windows Phone but it was looking like they didn't have as much work as they would they would.

This was concerning for MS as they thought that devs wouldn't put much effort into making the app work properly on WP and would just release the same version as Android. Not to mention, there would never be a reason for devs to switch to developing UWP apps, if their Android apps could just be ported without much effort.

Not quite what you are asking, but if it's written in React-Native or Xamarin, then it can be pretty close to the same codebase from Android to Windows Phone (or I guess they like it called Windows 10 Mobile)

> Android apps will at some point work on Windows Phone

Shines a whole additional angle on the "first-class Linux subsystem inside Win 10" efforts lately..

I couldn't find anything - is it possible you're thinking of running Android apps on Blackberry devices? That was a thing on BB10.

Edit: `belltaco found it :)

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