The actual answer to this question is that basic premise of the question is wrong – developers are and will continue to develop for Windows. The question is a bit like saying “Why are all web developers using React?” and is driven by the typical over-hyped communities that latch onto the latest shiny thing that some developer has hacked together in their spare time (or equally as bad the latest language/framework/library released by Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc). Now, I’m not going to write here that Microsoft has made it easy for Windows developers, nor that the latest incarnation of their developer platform, Universal Windows Platform, has been in any form successful. What I do want to point out is that there are a massive number of applications still written, maintained and even created for Windows every day, and that building applications for Windows allows you to target an astonishingly large market (think of the total number of Windows based devices that are targetable).
So if there are so many developers still writing applications for Windows, why does the market think that Windows isn’t worth targeting? and why are there so few developers wanting to invest into learning the latest features of UWP?
I was doing a bit of trawling today looking for some content on why developers should build for Windows and came across this post entitled “Choose Your Platform” which kind of confuses me – I typically use “platform” to refer to the operating system an application is to run on but interestingly Wikipedia defines a computing platform as something more generic that can be applied at different levels. Interestingly enough, from the url of the page you can see it was originally called “Choose your technology” which I guess is even more vague.
What’s interesting about the “Choose Your Platform” page is that it dumps UWP, WPF and WinForms into one bucket and Win32 API into another…. I feel this is kind of weird. It also completely negates all the higher level frameworks/technologies (Electron, PWAs, Xamarin Forms, React Native etc) that could be used to build applications for Windows (and other platforms).
I clicked around a bit and went back up to the parent page “Develop Windows desktop applications” – here, as you can see from the image, the situation gets even more laughable…. In all seriousness, did Microsoft find some programmer out of the late 90’s to write this: “Create Windows desktop applications that your customers can use at work and play using Win32 and COM APIs to leverage features of the operating system”.
Over the last couple of years it’s been evident that Microsoft views Windows, and the associated app platform, as playing second (or perhaps third) fiddle to everything they’re selling that starts with Azure. Furthermore, what cycles have been invested in the Windows developer platform have been retrained on uplifting all those WinForms and WPF applications so that they can be distributed via the Store, take advantage of all the security/identify context that comes with Windows 10, and of course all the new APIs that are being added to UWP.
What’s missing is any form of marketing that explains in clear terms why companies, and developers, should care about Windows development? It’s not enough to say “you can build an app that uses ink” or “you can build an app that connects to Azure” – seriously I can build an iOS/Android app that does both of those just as quickly as I can for Windows. The big value proposition of UWP was it’s ability to write once and run anywhere – this all but died when Windows Phone was buried (RIP). Xbox requires so much hackery and patching the user interface and interaction model that it’s almost quicker to build a separate app, and Surface Hub (v1) doesn’t support .NET Standard 2.0. Seriously, and we wonder why Windows is such an after thought.
So, let’s adjust my opening question to “Why are companies ignoring Windows when building applications?” – and the answer is because they don’t see any benefit over what they can build via a responsive website. It’s as simple as that. Microsoft, lift your game. Fix your online presence and start promoting your developer platform again.
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Contact Built to Roam for more information on building applications for Windows
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I think the Windows OS is lacking somewhere to retain its users unlike android and iOS from using it so it indirectly restricts developers from making an app for windows for which is not successful commercially.
Hi @Bethany,
It’s interesting that you say that Windows OS is not able to retain users because the latest stats has Windows back at number 1 by market share (see http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share). However, you’re 100% correct that Microsoft/Windows haven’t been able to convince developers to build amazing apps for the platform.
The biggest inhibitor is not to do with the app development platform, it’s that you can achieve so much with a responsive website using say Angular, React or Vue (or any other JS framework) that it’s difficult to convince companies to invest in native apps. This is the same issue that MacOS has.
As we start to see cross-platform technologies adopting web assembly (eg https://platform.uno/how-it-works/) we’ll start to see more companies investing in building for native and web across all platforms.