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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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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.
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