Called the Desktop Bridge,  it also opens up a huge range of Windows 10 APIs including live tiles, notifications, Cortana, search, Ink, translate and many more. It also means the new UWP apps can be listed on the Windows Store.

In technical terms, after conversion, “programs” are packaged, serviced, and deployed in the form of a UWP app package (an .appx or an .appxbundle). The UWP package then has executables that run with full trust instead of in an app container. This also gives a converted app a package identity, which is required to use some UWP APIs.

It also supports all coding done in Microsoft Visual Studio (VS) from Version 10 (2010) onwards.

Hosted Web Apps including Microsoft VS, MacOS Manifold/Node.js, and Chrome are easy to convert to UWP apps. It allows the update and calling of native Windows APIs from JavaScript running on a website. The UWP than goes into the Windows Store that tracks status, ratings, reviews, analytics, and ensures payment Windows apps.

There is now a Windows Bridge for iOS that will import Xcode into VS 10 or later and then uses Windows Bridge to produce a UWP app. Microsoft also includes a free 60-day virtual machine of choice — VMWare, Hyper-V, Virtual Box or Parallels — to test the conversion.

The promise of a “Bridge” for Android is progressing. This is proving a lot more difficult because of the plethora of development environments, fragmentation, and device types in Android (programmers may like to read more here). Those apps written in XML and edited using Android Studio or Eclipse are easiest to bring over, but it shows the difference between Apple’s disciplined development approach and Android’s laissez-faire approach.

The first major UWP apps to appear in the Windows Store (link filtered to show UWP only) using the Bridge include Evernote, Arduino IDE, doubleTwist, PhotoScape, MAGIX Movie Edit Pro, Virtual Robotics Kit, Relab, SQL Pro, Voya Media, Predicted Desire and korAccount.

These join popular apps like Twitter, Netflix, Pandora, Facebook, Amazon/Kindle, Dropbox, WeChat, VLC, Adobe products, LastPass, Pinterest, Fitbit, eBay and thousands more.

Microsoft advised that this time last year (2015) there were 669,000 apps. It has not released updated numbers, because unlike Google Play and Apple App store, it is currently going through a painstaking purge to remove any “suspect or abandoned apps” and undertaking active curation of the Windows Store. All it will say is that it hopes the Store will only contain useful, proven apps by 30 September.

Comment

This is not about the number of apps in the Windows Store but the opening of the Windows Platform to all developers. These bridges build on announcements for Bash on Ubuntu (Canonical) and growing support for open-source and Xamarin.

It is also about the massive number of Windows APIs that can be called — Cortana, Bing, Ink, Search, Translate, and more — that make a developer’s life all that easier.

But there is a catch – all this only works on Windows 10 Anniversary edition or later. At last count, that was around 22.99% or about 300 million devices. Windows 7 sits stubbornly at 47.25%, Windows 8.x at 9.74% and XP at 9.36%. Let’s face it, these figures are not going to change much until the old legacy hardware dies or is replaced.