Microsoft announces universal Windows apps, which simply means that now apps will run across the Windows family of products: PCs, tablets, phones, and Xbox. This is a great news as Microsoft is the only software company to offer such integration and experience. With this new app model app developers will only have code once and their apps will run on different devices with little to no re-coding, since starting with the release of Windows Phone 8.1, all the platforms will share the same set of APIs, security and other resources.
The company also said that universal Windows app is coming to the Xbox platform, but didn’t mention when exactly will happen. However no every app released will automatically run on Xbox One, according to an Engadget interview with Steven Guggenheimer, corporate vice president in the Developer Platform and Evangelism group, said that the Xbox app ecosystem will be very carefully controlled and that a dedicated Xbox team will decide if the app will make it to the console, and Microsoft gets the last say on whether an app will be locked behind an Xbox Live Gold subscription.
Not to get confused here, Microsoft is just updating the Windows Phone and Xbox platform to support common Windows runtime (programing language), and the company isn’t yet announcing the merge of Windows RT with Windows Phone operating systems or Windows Store with Windows Phone Store, which may happen in a near future.
