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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
(www.theverge.com)
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
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.
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.