The furor over UWP’s death knell

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For once, I’m with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo F0ley on this: UWP is on its way out and there’s nothing the fanbois can do to stop the shift. We saw the
[See the full post at: The furor over UWP’s death knell]

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Elly, abbodi86, GreatAndPowerfulTech

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Saying that UWP dead because of PWAs…. reminds of the people in 2011/2012 who would say stuff like “.NET is dead because people will program for Metro using html5 + javascript”

And it turns out. 8 years later, .NET is still very much alive and well.

So just wait and see.  It isn’t journalists that decide what developer technology stacks live and die… it’s the developers themselves.

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woody

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Well put.

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I admit I don’t really follow UWP apps much. But my impression is that there is one big difference: UWP has a lot less support than .NET did. I only rarely see anyone talking about their Windows Store app rather than just providing a Win32 download. I know tons of people who say they use Windows 10 but never use the apps from the Store. I don’t think you could say that about .NET.

The advantage of PWA is that you can develop once and have it run on multiple platforms. Seeing as it seems most of the UWP apps I’ve seen are also-runs of Android or iOS apps, it would seem to be what people would choose. Why lock yourself into Windows?

Plus Microsoft is ending their own browser engine, which is a huge part of UWP. They aren’t incorporating Chromium into UWP, but making it a Win32 app. That seems odd if they plan on supporting UWP for any extended period of time. And, if they don’t keep supporting it, then it dies whether the developers want it or not.

I think it remains to see how much they care about UWP once Edge is released and Windows 7 is no longer being released.

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Look at:

What the heck is a “Progressive Web App”? Seriously.

https://dev.to/ben/what-the-heck-is-a-progressive-web-app-seriously-923 

So Woody, what do you mean by a PWA?

See also:

Seriously, though. What is a progressive web app?

https://medium.com/@amberleyjohanna/seriously-though-what-is-a-progressive-web-app-56130600a093 

 

I think we’re talking about the movement to move (almost) all PC operations off the individual or local machine, and up into the Cloud (or a local cloud of some sort). Web App brings to mind an app inside the web browser, as ChromeOS was doing before Android and Linux Apps were added to Chromebooks.

This model sees apps as universal, and not tied to one platform (Windows, Apple, Chrome, Linux). UWP has failed to gain traction because it is tied to one platform — Windows 10.  UWP has also been hobbled by a lack of dedicated effort on Microsoft’s part to develop, curate and maintain high quality and truly functional UWP Apps in their online Store.

A Cloud Desktop or a local simulant of this, seems to be where Azure, AWS and Google’s cloud platform are heading. The applications and most of the OS live in the Cloud on remote servers, while just a minimal user interface and something to access the Web or the local Network remain on the local device. Combined with a display which is either part of the device or connects with it wirelessly, this may be the future of Personal and Corporate computing.

This means no more local hardware and driver issues. It also means security is handled by the remote host, not the local device. But data which needs to be retained or duplicated (backed up) locally still needs enough local resources to handle storage and retrieval, as well as local display and limited editing.

 

So there — I fixed the idea of PWA to the point where it may make some real-world sense.

You’re welcome.

-- rc primak

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Great Lake Bunyip, abbodi86, Cybertooth

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When I first read Woody’s post, I was hopeful that this would mean that the PC model of local applications with local storage was safe because the  PC was no longer being turned into a mere terminal. Then I read the first line on the page that Woody linked to–

Progressive Web Apps are user experiences that have the reach of the web…

–and was scratching my head as to what it meant. The rest of the page read equally like vague marketing fluff.

Now it’s a bit clearer in my mind, and so I thank you for the links and your explanation.

The threat persists.

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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rc primak wrote:

This means no more local hardware and driver issues. It also means security is handled by the remote host, not the local device. …

So there — I fixed the idea of PWA to the point where it may make some real-world sense.

You’re welcome.

I’m not convinced PWA means either of those fundamental changes. Any citations for those views?

Microsoft’s definition is:

Progressive Web Apps are just great web sites that can behave like native apps —or, perhaps, Progressive Web Apps are just great apps, powered by Web technologies and delivered with Web infrastructure.
Welcoming Progressive Web Apps to Microsoft Edge and Windows 10

Which is not unlike Wikipedia’s definition:

Progressive web applications (PWAs) are web applications that load like regular web pages or websites but can offer the user functionality such as working offline, push notifications, and device hardware access traditionally available only to native applications.
PWAs combine the flexibility of the web with the experience of a native application.
Progressive web applications

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Microsoft and Wikipedia have some of the more vague definitions of just what a PWA is. Similar to Google’s vague definition.

The sources I cited are looking for a more specific, more concrete definition of PWA.

So the idea that these Web Apps will be more like applications hosted by Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS, or something like the way Chromebook and Android apps operate, comes from the more narrow definitions of PWA in my references, not the broader and (to my mind) too vague definitions offered by Microsoft, Google and Wikipedia.

I did look at the Microsoft, Google and Wikipedia definitions before selecting my references. But my references are seeking something more specific and concrete.

What will actually happen may depend on who your Cloud vendor will be.

-- rc primak

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Nothing to support your two main contentions about the advantages of PWAs then?

rc primak wrote:

This means no more local hardware and driver issues. It also means security is handled by the remote host, not the local device.

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It occurs to me really that they may well have killed the deal by instead of offering sensible, useful Apps they chose to pack Win8, 8.1 with cruddy Apps and Ads that most, including me, cant wait to strip out. Got worse with Win10 Candy Cra.. errm Crush and XBOX stuff all with a hint of Advertising. That just plain irritated folks to the point they avoided them like the plague as well as App reliability issues. Ok not for everyones taste but News Weather Sport Money the desktop Mail and Calender (sure they work for seeing whats in you Mail box and Alerts, and even a limited appoinments functionality, but work way better in conjunction with the real Outlook in Office, and no way I would use for Mail) Music well it works I guess. But the rest are another wasted 5 mins to remove or block from updating.
The usefull Apps I listed above, that I would consider worthy of keeping, need constant care and Maintanence by M$ where does the Weather com from Insiders all over the globe watching the Sky referring to a Pine Cone for the preciptation amounts? Or News Insiders again watching World events. The point I am trying to make is that they are an ongoing cost and as such its more likely cost cutting than the general ambivalence towards the Apps thats killed them.
Case in point this week the death knell was sounded for Win8.1 Metro Apps, limited Market as Win8, 8.1 were hardly stellar user and usage figures. Hopefully PWA Apps may fill the gap in the future for the useful aspects of Windows beleagured Apps experiment, but as they are synonomous with Google is it going to be and Ad’s and Snooping fest? Then again why should I care I use an M$ limited or Hybrid account on a Local user Profile ah well time will tell.

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It’s Redmond’s continued forcing and cajoling of these APIs/Ecosystems onto their OS/Application ecosyetem developer base and by extention the OS’s end users that always leads to failure of MS’s efforts. And that Apple like App store closed ecosystem is the very reason that MS had such a large share of the PC/Laptop OS market place in the first place and that currently is still the case in these few remaining days before the new(8 to 10/newer) end of times approaches where 2020 is going to be a watershed moment for alternative OSs if MS does not wise up and Make windows 10 behave more like the Windows 7’s OS Application/Ecosystem.

Had the folks in Redmond retained the Windows 7/Eariler sort of OS ecosystem that retains more end user control over their own PC/Laptop Hardware and instead made all that other nosense OPTIONAL then MS would have had better end results. Once and for All time, Folks in Redmond, get this into your collective heads: PCs and Laptops are not Phones/Tablets and all that Phone/Tablet ecosystem and business model is not going to ever be lovingly recieved by the majority of the productivity  OS(Windows 7 Forever) end users on their laptop and PC based hardware.

Redmond you had better get smart and offer extended Windows 7 security Updates until 2023  to all who will gladly pay the price and not just only your enterprise and volume licensing customers. There are loads of older PCs/Laptops that still make use of win32/Win7 and really you may not want to see just how many will take on some alternative OS ecosystem on their older PC/Laptops after Jan 2020. And that may just give Linux the needed critical mass of around 10% to 15% OS market share/user base to make the economy of scale large enough for more PC/Laptop OEMs to support Linux as an viable and rapidly growing alternative to Windows.

That Extended Windows 7, and 8.1, support until 2023  will still allow Microsoft the time to rip all that nonsense out of windows 10 once and for all and maybe Microsoft can offer some Optional API/Ecosystem that folks will be more receptive to, but only if that API/Ecosystem remains outside of the essential parts of the OS. Microsoft your OSs at Windows 7/XP/older where popular because their end users where served by their OS/Ecosystem and not the other way around with the end users made subservient to the OS/Ecosystem.

Microsoft, Stop making your desktop PC/Laptop OS end users suffer for your Failed Smart-Phone App/App Store aspirations. You really need to offer a Productivity Version of Windows that is available to all, and not just enterprise customers, and an optional different OS/Ecosystem to any who only use their devices for consumption. Maybe create a base Combo OS/VM facility that’s productivity oriented and then offer up some Optional consumer/comsumption OS that’s installed on that OS/VM combo as a hosted OS instance and kept as a separate OS/installed applications instance where the OS’s end users can run the latest New and Shiny without affecting the base productivity OS/VM facility and its functionality.

That way Productivity based end users can go about their days unaffected by any of that other unnecessary expermentation. Windows 10 needs to be replumed to be a Windows 7 like OS and a Type-1 hypervisor in one that’s of a totally productivity oriented base design with the Option for the end user to install in a VM/Containerized Environment any other OSs that offer alternative non productivity based functionality, or even other productivity based OSs. If the VM hosted OS instance is buggy then no problem just erase that instance and no damage is done to the base OS/VM hypervisor facility, rinse and repeat.

But the spying and the crapware/bloatware/adware forcing has to be kept out of the Base OS/VM’s code base and really has no place being there at all. Let folks install in a VM hosted OS instance/instances for whatever they want with whatever preconditions that only affects that hosted OS instance and whatever it’s installed applications/files require that’s limited to only the hosted OS instance/its installed applications and files.

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@ anonymous #1516559

I highly doubt that MS want to backtrack from their forced auto-updates/upgrades and forced Telemetry & Data collection policies in Win 10.
So, only the exodus of users from Win 10 after the EOL of Win 7 in Jan 2020 = loss of significant world market share = can force MS to change course or backtrack, like how they are being forced to change Edge and UWP apps/programs because of their very low world market share. In fact, near 0% world market share has forced them to shutdown Win 10 Mobile this coming 31 Dec 2019.

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Well some Enterprise and Volume licensing customers will be getting Windows 7 security updates ->for a price<- option until 2023 so maybe there can be some methods to allow some to purchase that via some reseller market. It’s easy to for MS to offer the extended windows 7 security updates for windows 7 until 2023 because essentially windows 8/8.1 is just so similar to windows 7 at the kernel level and API level with windows 8/8.1 having all that TIFKAM UI/Modern-RT(renamed again to UWP under Win 10) apps ecosystem tacked on top in a shell like manner for 8/8.1.

So MS already has to support windows 8.1 for security updates until 2023 anyways and the 8.1 kernel/API is similar to 7’s Kernel/API so security updates on 8.1 work on 7  or can with very  minimal effort  be ported to work with windows 7 also. But if PCs/Laptops would just ship with an OS that’s basically a VM/Type-1 Hypervisor facility then the end user would be able to install whatever OS/OSs they desired in a virtualized environment with the VM/Type-1 Hypervisor facility allowing the PC/laptop owner to install and run multiple Different OS instances at the same time.

And that’s essentially what MS is doing in a more limited manner with that “Subsystem for Linux” where it’s now possible to run a full Linux Kernel/terminal from within windows 10. But I’d rather that MS would come to their senses and just offer all windows 7 users the Option of purchasing extended windows 7 security updates until 2023.

Windows 10 has undergone such a rapid OS and WDDM-version update cadence that I seriously doubt that any older laptop discrete(legacy hardware) mobile GPUs are going to play nice under windows 10, especially discrete mobile GPUs in laptops where the laptop’s OEM has only certified the Graphics drivers for windows 7 and 8/8.1. That’s a lot of potential licensing revenue lost for MS from millions of windows 7 users that still have not moved from windows 7 and will still be on 7 after it goes EOL for consumers in 2020(not until 2023 for Enterprise/Volume Licensees).

Windows 10 has on its own undergone as many WDDM version updates as the previous 4 versions of Windows OS combined. And Windows 10 has all that tiles/apps/other nonsense more integrated into the windows 10 OS but it still can be removed/made optional by 2023.

Really the Linux supporters should be thankful that windows 10’s baked in spyware/bloatware/adware pushing and update forcing will result in more folks going over to a bare metal Linux distro on laptops because the Windows 7/8.1(Replaced 8)  OSs have not had an OpenGL update in years and Blender 2.8 may not work with older GPU hardware on Windows compared to Blender 2.8 on Linux(Bare Metal) with Linux still getting graphics driver support for older Laptop’s(GPU Driver Updates/Fixes) via the open source community. That “Day of the Linux On the Desktop” only needs to see the Linux OS market share reach 10% – 15% in order for Linux OS distros to reach critical market mass and begin attracting more attention from PC/Laptop OEMs.

I can happily purchase a new laptop as soon as folks like system76/Other  Linux OS PC/Laptop OEMs start offering laptops/PCs that come with AMD’s Raven Ridge APUs from either the 2000 series Zen/Vega Raven Ridge/First generation offerings on GF’s 14nm node or the 2nd generation Raven Ridge 3000 series Zen+/Vega  offerings on GF’s 12nm process node. So really I’m just waiting for that and some Zen/Zen+ APUs with Vega integrated graphics from some Linux OS Laptop OEM within the next year hopefully.  And even Vega 8 integrated graphics is sufficient for my needs but there is also Vega Integrated 10, and Vega Integrated 11 APU/Vega graphics offerings that are mobile/laptop targeted SKUs.

Intel/Nvidia is too costly for my budget currently and Intel’s integrated graphics is not there yet compared to AMD’s integrated Vega graphics or AMD’s/Nvidia’s discrete mobile GPU graphics(Intel currently does not compete in the discrete GPU market place but has plans to begin offering discrete GPUs in the 2020/later time frame).

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You had to know that UWP was dead the second they announced the new Edge browser would be a native Win32 application.  If that doesn’t say it all I don’t know what will.

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Microsoft just consolidates all .NET stacks (including UWP) under the new .NET 5 (scheduled to be released at the end of 2020) umbrella. This means that all .NET stacks will get access to features currently available for UWP only. That’s all what Microsoft was talking about.

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Another in a long list of abandoned technologies from MS. Developers were wary because of this history before UWP; Silverlight anyone? Also, UWP only made sense as a cross platform or phone only stack. With the death of Windows phone, one of the primary pillars of UWP is gone. On W10, Win32 applications work fine and are much more powerful than their UWP counterparts. Thus for the vast majority of users, the W32 application is a more reasonable option than the UWP one.

PWA and similar ideas are OS agnostic in that they are browser based applications that may run without a need for a permanent connection. The key is browser standards compliance and browser availability. Chromium and derivatives are generally available on all OSes as is Firefox and derivatives. Both have good standards compliance; Chromium being better than Firefox. So as long as the PWA runs in either family the underlying OS is irrelevant. PWAs in their purest actually represent a real threat to Windows as they mature. As they become as capable as a native application they become a viable alternative for users. Since they are OS agnostic, there is no reason to use a specific OS other than inertia. Any competent marketing guru or salesperson will tell, relying on customer inertia is rely on customer good will. Good will MS has been squandering with W10.

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[EP]

well folks check out this recent article from Windows Central
titled “Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform is not dead, but it has evolved over the years”

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-uwp-not-dead-evolved

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by EP.

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