Windows Phone is a great mobile platform that suffers from a crippling lack of popular mobile apps. Nothing Microsoft has done so far as generated significant developer interest in the platform. What’s more, popular apps that are released to the platform aren’t updated and supported with the same regularity as those apps’ Android and iOS counterparts. However, The Information has come out with a new report that gives us new details on Microsoft’s last-ditch effort to make its mobile platform relevant.
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According to The Information, Microsoft this week will show off “a single code base inside the software that will allow an app to run well on phones, tablets and PCs, as opposed to being optimized for one screen size.” This is a big deal because while Windows Phone doesn’t have a strong app developer base, the desktop version of Windows absolutely does. So in theory, anyone who makes software and applications for Windows should soon be able to make Windows Phone apps with ease.
The Information also writes that Microsoft is planning on unveiling a new product this week in the form of “a phone-laptop hybrid” that’s designed to appeal to enterprise users but that likely won’t be available for a while.
Whether this succeeds in making Windows Phone a relevant platform is anyone’s guess. Microsoft started off far, far behind iOS and Android and catching up to those two platforms has proven to be a very difficult task. However, if Microsoft can get its desktop app developers on board with this new mobile-apps-made-easy code base, it could go a long way toward making Windows Phone much more popular.
