Windows 10 might just win the app war. Here’s why

Windows has an app problem.

We saw it with the ill-fated Windows RT, when some of tech’s biggest names thought about making RT apps, chuckled and said “naaaaaah”. And we can see it right now on Windows Phone, which boasts 120,000 certified apps compared to Apple’s eleventy billion. We’re exaggerating, but only just: the combined app count of the Apple and Google stores is 2.5 million.

Microsoft has a solution to this app gap, and it’s pretty clever: if app developers won’t come to Windows, then Windows will come to them.

It’s clever, but it’s not quite as simple as we’ve made it sound there. Getting iOS and Android apps on to Windows is much, much easier than before, but it’s not exactly a one-button process.

As Microsoft points out, it’s quite similar to what happens with Amazon, who use a version of Android for their Kindle Fire devices: once developers have created their app they then need to do some Amazon-specific faffing around so the apps work on Kindles.

For Windows, that faffing depends on what platform your app runs on. If you’re an iOS developer it’s quite straightforward: take your existing code, hook it into the various Windows APIs, compile it into a Windows app and Bob’s your mother’s brother.

It’s a bit more complicated coming from Android, because Microsoft has created an Android subsystem inside Windows that offers a kind of Android Lite. Microsoft will go into more detail about that this week, and about the tools it’s offering website owners to turn their sites – which people often don’t pay for – into Windows Store apps, which people are often much happier to pay for.