Current Windows Phone App Ported Easily To Windows 8
If you have favorite Windows Phone apps that you are afraid will take a long time to upgrade to Windows 8, fret not. As current Windows Phone developer Rick Walrond has shown, a lot of the present Windows Phone apps might be quite easy to port over to Windows 8 whilst retaining 90% of the original code behind the app.
What Walrond did as a test for his own app AlphaDrop, may be replicated by other developers in order to quickly port their apps on to Windows 8. So other than the benefit of both Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 running the same platform for apps, Windows 8 might also come with the added advantage of supporting Windows Phone 7 apps with relative ease.
This also means that if other developers take the cue and start porting their apps well in advance of the commercial Windows 8 launch, the new OS might actually come with a lot more apps on the Windows Store than originally expected. Of course, that will only happen if Microsoft also starts accepting and screening apps for the Store ahead of the launch.
Walrond notes that even though it seems smooth enough for current apps to be ported to Windows, there are some minor problems such as the inability to share data across platforms. Also, more complex apps will take more work to port. AlphaDrop was a simple game that was ported to Windows 8 in two weeks time while retaining about 90% of its original coding. The test use a Samsung Series 7 Slate running the Windows Developer Preview.
Rick Walrond had posted his results on YouTube, which was later picked up by news source NeoWin for their blog.