Microsoft woos app developers to Windows

Microsoft has steadily lost influence in the technology industry as software developers gravitated to mobile technologies like Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

Now it has a plan to win them back, in part by making it easier for them to run their existing Android and iOS apps on Windows.

At a recent conference in San Francisco, Microsoft said it had created new tools that will allow developers to convert apps written in the programming languages used by Android and iOS developers to software that can run on Windows 10, a new version of the Microsoft operating system coming out in the summer.

“We want to make sure for every developer you have the widest, most vibrant user base that your applications can target,” said Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, in a speech at the event.

The step was one of many Microsoft said it was taking to enhance the appeal of Windows for the developers whose decisions can turn technologies into thriving ecosystems teeming with apps, or wastelands where the most popular software shows up after long delays or not at all. Windows has not yet become such a desert. It is still a powerful force in the lucrative corporate software market.

But the momentum in the technology industry is clearly with Android, Google’s mobile operating system, and iOS, the software that powers iPhones and iPads.

Perhaps an even more important step that Microsoft has taken to win over developers is promising that there will be 1 billion Windows 10 devices for them to write apps for within the next two to three years.

That goal reflects a major change the company is making with its new operating system, which will run nearly every sort of modern computing device, from PCs to smartphones to the Xbox One to HoloLens, Microsoft’s new augmented reality headset.

Microsoft has struggled to gain market share in smartphones and tablets, and many of the hottest developers today have drifted away from its sphere of influence as a result. By consolidating all types of devices onto a common version of Windows, the company believes it can sufficiently enlarge the market to win them back.

Previously, the company said it would take the unusual step of allowing people running two of the most recent versions of Windows on their PCs to upgrade to Windows 10 without charge.

Getting most of the market running the latest form of its operating system is another way to make life easier for developers.

“They’ve got a big hill to climb,” said Merv Adrian, an analyst at Gartner, the technology research firm. “I don’t want to minimise that. But they’re making themselves broadly available; they’re making it really easy.”

It still is not clear how many developers will favor Microsoft’s approach. There are huge differences in how users operate touch-screen devices, game consoles and PCs. Writing a single universal app that works well on all of them could end up being more technically challenging than Microsoft is letting on.

One issue for Microsoft is that there are still enormous numbers of Windows applications written to older technology specifications that prevent them from being distributed through Microsoft’s online app store for security reasons.

At the conference, Microsoft said it had created new software tools that will allow developers of those older applications - more than 16 million of which exist - to put them into the Windows Store, as its app store is called.

In an interview, Terry Myerson, Microsoft’s executive vice president of operating systems, said the real reason developers will write for Windows was the huge commercial opportunity that the software represents.

“We’ve dramatically reduced the amount of work for developers to get started on Windows,” Myerson said. “But they’re doing it because they’re going to have the opportunity to reach these 1 billion devices.”