It’s no secret that Microsoft still has a problem on the mobile front two years on from its acquisition of Nokia’s handset business
The deal which was led by Ballmer. Windows Phone continues to hold single-digit market share, offering little incentive for developers to invest in building apps for the platform.
However, earlier this month, it seemed that Microsoft would abandon its Android bridge, dubbed Project Astoria. That decision was a mistake, according to comments made by Ballmer at Microsoft’s annual general meeting on Wednesday.
An audience member questioned Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the continued absence of key apps for Windows Phone, to which Nadella responded that it was appealing to Windows developers through its universal apps program, which lets them build apps that work across PCs and mobile devices.
At the meeting, Nadella was asked about the lack of high-profile apps, such as one from Starbucks, and other support for Windows 10 on mobile devices. Nadella’s response was that Microsoft is encouraging developers to make universal apps that will run on PC, mobile, and Xbox One.
Project Astoria is mistake
“That won’t work,” Ballmer told Bloomberg, adding that Windows phones need to “run Android apps.” While the ability for Windows 10 to emulate Android apps may never see the light of day, Microsoft is still trying to make it easy for iOS developers to bring their apps to the platform.
“That won’t work,” Ballmer is quoted by Bloomberg as saying as Nadella spoke. Microsoft instead needs to allow Android apps to run on Windows Phone.
Microsoft announced universal apps for Windows 10 in April 2014, shortly after Nadella took the reins from Ballmer. A year later Microsoft announced the iOS and Android software bridges to bring those developers in the fold and subsequently took a $7.6bn write-down on its Nokia acquisition that Ballmer led.
However, Microsoft hasn’t confirmed that Project Astoria is dead, with its official line being that it is “not ready yet”. Previously the company planned to release Astoria bridge code in a public beta by fall.
Astoria was more limited than the iOS bridge called Islandwood, which let iOS developers build for mobile and PC. Astoria on the other hand only worked on Windows 10 mobile devices, thanks to an Android subsystem/emulation layer in Windows 10 mobile.
But recent builds of Windows 10 mobile have dropped the Android subsystem, again signalling that Microsoft might be pulling away from the plan.
Windows Phone apps
When a shareholder asked Nadella to address the lack of apps for its Windows Phone platform, the company’s current chief executive outlined his Windows universal apps strategy, which hopes to entice developers to create new software that can run on both desktop and tablet Windows 10 PCs and Windows Phone.
Ballmer began talking over the top of Nadella, stating “that won’t work,” and saying that Microsoft should instead develop software to enable users to run Android apps on Windows Phone.
This spring, Microsoft announced plans for Windows 10 and Windows Phone to run a new type of universal Windows 10 app, while also enabling developers to easily port their software from Android or iOS into universal Windows apps.
Ballmer, Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder, also criticised Microsoft for fudging how it reports sales and profit margins for its cloud and hardware business.
“If they talk about it as key to the company, they should report it,” Ballmer told Bloomberg, labelling Microsoft’s run-rate reporting for its cloud business as “bullshit. Run-rate represents a yearly rate of sales based on a single snapshot.
“They should report the revenue, not the run rate,” he said, adding that Microsoft should report margins since they’re very low in cloud services and hardware relative to Microsoft’s traditional software business.
Microsoft currently offers bridge tools to allow developers to create Windows 10 universal apps that reuse their existing Objective-C code developed for iOS apps. This hasn’t resulted in a quick fix for Windows Phone users however.
In part, that’s because the Windows Phone market is insignificantly small and Windows 10 adoption has begun to slow down after an initial surge of upgrades. Data from StatCounter and NetApplications (cited by PCWorld in October) indicates that Windows 10 accounted for around 7 percent of online users, compared to the roughly 80 percent who are still using Windows XP, 7 or 8.
That makes Windows 10 roughly as large as Mac OS X as a platform, but representing a less attractive demographic of users. Apple’s Mac App Store hasn’t received the same enthusiasm developers have showered upon the iOS App Store, in part due to requirements that Mac apps be signed, among other restrictions. Microsoft imposes similar restrictions on its universal Windows 10 app store.
Further, given that the vast majority of Windows PC users have older OS versions installed, developers wanting to target Windows desktop users are far more likely to write conventional Win32 apps than learn an entirely new development style specifically to target a minority of Windows PCs and the extremely small segment of Windows Phones and tablets that can’t run conventional Windows software
App wars
The thinking behind the Universal Windows Platform is that developers only have to write their apps once, and target all the increasing millions of Windows 10 users across devices.
The catch is that because Microsoft has so little smartphone marketshare, hovering around 3% globally, developers are slow to bring their apps to Windows in the first place. And on the desktop, since traditional Windows software still works on Windows 10 desktops, developers have no incentive to work with the Windows Store at all.
Nadella also dismissed the shareholder’s idea of growing the Windows Store by directly approaching companies like Starbucks and getting them to bring their apps to Windows 10. Instead, he wants to focus on getting Windows 10 to be so big that developers can’t ignore it.
“We need to think of the unified platform instead of one-off, we have to organically build momentum for the platform and that is what we plan to do,” Nadella says.
Meanwhile, and to Ballmer’s point, Microsoft has a couple of projects in the work to make it super-simple for developers to bring their existing Android, Apple iOS, and older Windows apps to the Windows Store.
But Project Astoria, the company’s tool to bring Android apps over to Windows, seems to be missing in action, with rumors that it’s been shelved indefinitely.
And so, to Ballmer’s consternation, Microsoft is continuing in its very difficult task of getting developers to build for the Windows Store. Of course, given rumors that Microsoft is working on its own version of Android, it could be planning a Hail Mary play, too.
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