Future of Windows RT and Windows Phone with Windows 10

Question

Hi Community,

I'm a pure Microsoft developer since VB3 (for about 20 years now). I love C#! But with universal Apps Support in VS 2013 and Projects like XAMARIN my world is about to Change... Now I experimented with different things during the last year (Java Script, Xamarin, Cordova, native android and iOS development, universal apps, multi device hybrith apps...)

Next year I need to redesign a big web project which also has a native offline iOS App. After the redesign it should support Web (online) and offline Windows Desktop, iOS, Android, Windows RT and Windows Phone.

So I was thinking of using C# with Xamarin for the Business and Framework layer and Java Script and HTML5 for the UI Layer. But the effort of supporting Windows RT and Windows Phone here is much higher than supporting all the other plattforms because they only Support a very limited (and in some parts very different) set of the .net Framework.

So my question is: What ist the future of Windows RT and Windows Phone? Will it be obsolete with Windows 10 anyway (or Windows 11/12) because Windows 10 (or 11, 12...) will run with full Desktop Support on any device? (Which would be really great...)

Thanks, Markus

Answer 1

The Desktop won't be part of the Phone platform - we know that already. It's not certain wether Windows RT will keep support for the limited Desktop it has but that is merely based on rumors flying around. If Microsoft decides to bring a touch experience for Office that is as fully featured as the one available on the Windows RT Desktop right now I could see it happening however.

Microsoft's guidance when asked what to do if you wanted to gear your Apps towards Windows 10 was: keep developing Universal Apps and I guess that is pretty much the answer.

The full framework will be tied to the Desktop and Servers. The Universal App Model will be extended to Xbox and likely undergo evolution to support use cases not possible today but we won't see a big departure from that.

From the looks of it you won't need to do a separate Desktop Application with Windows 10 as Store Apps can be displayed in floating, resizable Windows then. Of course if you want to support older versions of the OS you won't get around that anyway - just wanted to mention it.

Answer 2

Hi Oliver, thanks for this clear answer!