Microsoft Announces Android App Support for Windows Phone

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As rumored in the last few months, Microsoft announced today at BUILD 2015 that Android apps would run on devices powered by its very own Windows Phone mobile operating system.

With this implementation, Microsoft is aiming to address the lack of apps in Windows Phone, thus offering support for one of the largest stores right on its devices.

Basically, with Windows 10, Microsoft will implement what it calls an Android subsystem in Windows Phone, so the new operating system would be able to run Android apps easily.

Developers should be able to bring their apps from Android to Windows 10 with a minimum of tweaks, so phones wouldn't encounter any difficulty in running any Android app that's available in the Play Store.

Microsoft hasn't provided more details on how exactly users would be able to get access to Android apps, but developers would have to port their apps to work on Windows 10 for phones. Basically, Android developers can reuse their code to bring apps on Windows 10 handsets, with more details to be provided during BUILD 2015 Day 2 in a dedicated session.

Needless to say, this is a smart move for Microsoft because the company still has a hard time tackling the lack of apps for both Windows and Windows Phone.

Windows 10 is projected to launch during the summer with all these changes, but the phone version could arrive shortly after that, most likely before the end of the back-to-school shopping season. New flagships running Windows 10 are also expected.
 
Microsoft is just creating API so that developers can easily port their apps to windows 10 without having to rewrite the whole app. It isnt just as simple as installing an apk on windows 10. Some work has to be put in by the developers to make an app from ios and android run on windows 10. Also, Microsoft will then release api so that the then native to windows 10 app, can integrate with cortana, bing and spartan among other microsoft products
 
^^ Actually, there are different paths for android and iOS apps.

For Android apps, they have an emulation engine to make the android app run as it is as long as google services are not involved. As far as I could understand, there is no code changes or recompilation involved. At best, there might be some repackaging step.

For iOS apps, the method is to convert the Obj-C xcode project using visual studio into a windows phone universal project (which I suspect converts into C++) and then recompile it. various iOS API is being emulated for this. Of Course you may be out of luck with this path if the project uses complex third party libraries.
 
First of all, the WP app development sucks! While C# is a versatile language & Visual Studio is the best IDE the documentation and samples are too confusing and the API is too lacking.
I am sad to see MS give up on its development platform instead of improving it.
Also they have changed the default design from the unique page & pivot based to more like Android design with hamburger menu. All in all WP is a failure according to me.
 
^^ I do not agree. Windows Phone 7.x and may be even 8.0 development may have been a bit of a pain. But if you are programming for Windows Phone 8.1+ using the Universal Win RT path, its a breeze. There is very little learning curve and you can get productive very very fast compared to Android or iOS development.

A 4 member team with zero experience in C# was able to productively build a fairly non trivial Windows 8.1 Universal app in 2 months. This was in last year and we started working with pre-release versions of Visual Studio Update 2 that introduced the window universal project types.

The final code was written so well (thanks to the design made by yours truly :p) that a single person was able to use the same code to prototype a Android and iOS version using Xamarin within a couple of weeks. In contrast, The iOS and android native app teams each having more than 10 people in Europe took more than 6 months to build the same thing in Java and Obj-C. Another team in Europe tried to build a HTML5 version, but they ended up spending over 1.5 years to build the app with majority of the time being spent for optimizing performance and fixing bugs.

I do agree that MS should concentrate more on their platform SDK to help windows 8.1 and making it cross platform (as per their strategy of going stuff for other platforms) which I guess they already have plans for, but I think giving the chance to run android apps directly will make developers lazy to develop for the platform.
 
^^ You have much higher experience in this field and I wouldn't dare to argue with you. I am just a student and learning stuff & MS platform has been the most difficult for me so far.
I was doing a simple Android app for my final year project & since I had some C# knowledge, I decided to develop the same app for WP8. Oh boy, it was so painful! Searching through numerous MSDN & Technet articles for simple functionality like XML parsing gave me confusing & mutually conflicting information. Ultimately, I gave up trying to parse XML, and changed my backend code to generate JSON instead. (BTW, WP does not support standard XML parsing system like SAX or PullParser).
Their documentation is nowhere close to the Android developer reference which is continuously updated. Instead MS makes a new file everytime they change the API or add a new one & keeps the old documentation as it is, confusing things and making devs go figure it out.

Also the unique point of WP was its UI, which was kinda awesome. Now they seemed to have killed it in favor of hamburger like design.
Look at the screenshots, are they any different from Android?
gsmarena_001.jpg

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gsmarena_002.jpg


http://blog.gsmarena.com/microsoft-shares-new-windows-10-design-for-phones/
 
Nice news. But any idea if on current win 8.1 phone we can run apks?
Also will current 8.1 devices get win 10 update?
 
^^ Obviously, you need to do some basic work for repackaging it into a appx bundle for Windows Phone. But the basic work reqd doesn't involve writing code or compiling it again.
 
Lord Nemesis said:
^^ Obviously, you need to do some basic work for repackaging it into a appx bundle for Windows Phone. But the basic work reqd doesn't involve writing code or compiling it again.
Click to expand...
That's what I said ? Or do you want to get the last word on everything? You had mentioned reusing the code before so I didn't mention again. But it was important to know that its not as easy as throwing the apk on the sd card and having android apps.
 
^^ Yes, but its also equally important to understand that the process for android might not involve compiling the code again as long as you do not rely on google services or need live tile support. Looking at the preliminary demo videos from MS, they are going to provide an online tool where you upload the Android apk file and it will tell you whether the apk is directly compatible or needs any changes in the code or manifests. Based on that and based on how MS handles the app submissions for Windows Phone, it is very likely that the developer will be able to just submit the raw apk file (when no changes are required) directly and MS will take care of the repackaging for Windows Phone store. If changes are required, you will be able to do them from within your android IDE build the compatible apk for submission.

For iOS, the process involves code conversion, so recompile is a mandatory step.
 
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