Comment by int_19h
8 years ago
That's a good argument for not having the app store on Win7, but APIs are a separate matter. If UWP API could be used to write something that is both a store app on Win10, but can also be deployed (let's say, in a manner similar to Electron apps, with the runtime packaged with the app) on Win7, I think we'd see a lot more of them. Even if you had to build it separately, so long as most of UI code could be shared, it's a boon.
As it is, it's easier to just target WPF.
All new APIs introduced since Windows 8 are mostly UWP ones, so basically you are asking for implementing Windows 10 on top Windows 7 kernel.
Yes.
And I know it's not an easy thing. But if e.g. the resources that went into Windows Mobile were spent there instead, I think the ecosystem would have been much further ahead, and we'd actually see more useful UWP apps.
It's a green field versus brown field problem. Windows Mobile was/is a green field where the only competition was exterior. Whereas UWP has to compete with Win32 on the desktop and tablet.
It's easy to armchair quarterback hindsight and wonder if they spent too much money in the green field, but it should be reasonable to see why the green field looked so appealing at the time.
It's also easy from 2017 to forget the real, hard, brown field battles that Microsoft did fight, particularly as Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 slowly become "forgotten" versions of Windows like Vista before them. Almost all of the missteps in Windows 8 that people yelled at Microsoft for direct consequences of building the UWP out and trying to make it competitive to Win32. Some of the features like the Charms were attempts to give the UWP some platform-wide features that would have really differentiated it from Win32, but found they added confusion because they weren't easily portable back to Win32, and that is just one example out of many. Brown field work is hard.
I don't get the impression that the green field work Microsoft tried in mobile ate resources that would have been better spent on the brown field work on the desktop. Win32 has such momentum at this point that had Microsoft thrown more resources at Windows 8, trying to bring UWP further ahead faster they might have only gotten more backlash from Win32 fans, and arguably there wasn't a much better plan for desktop than the uneasy truce between the two platforms/subsystems that Windows 10 is/has become.
If they had built a "UWP subsystem for Windows 7" at the time of Windows 8, people would have asked for it for the last remaining months of Windows XP. Asking for a "UWP subsystem for Windows 7" today is a bit like asking for that Windows XP subsystem. Windows 7 is feature complete; it may have security support for a bit longer, but it's out of support for new Windows features (it ended mainstream support in 2015; it ends extended support in 2020). It's now two released versions behind (8, 10) and more versions behind if you count "service packs" (8, 8.1, 10 (1506), 10 1511, 10 1607 (AU), 10 1703 (CU), and the new one (FCU) coming later this month/early next month).
Honest introspection: if you are a developer and someone asked for a feature to be backported to a version from 7 years ago that is 6 major versions back, would you support that or would you encourage them to pay for your hard work and upgrade to something more recent that already has that feature?
It's not just that the work is hard, it's ignoring years of hard work that you've already done.
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