Microsoft has been wanting to unify the Windows 10 experience across device platforms for some time now; since before it was released, in ...
Microsoft has been wanting to unify the Windows 10 experience across device platforms for some time now; since before it was released, in fact. But while that pot boils, Microsoft is doing several things. Let’s take a look at how this story is shaping up, and what the ending (new beginning?) might look like.
First of all, let’s tackle the problem of mobile.
This is and has always been Microsoft’s weak spot; Achilles Heel, if you will. The introduction of Windows Phone and then Windows 10 Mobile was a success of sorts, but it did not fully fructify because of one big reason – apps. By the time Microsoft got its act together on mobile and acquired Nokia, the mobile ship had sailed, captained by Android and ably first-officered by iOS.
What Microsoft did have at that point was a loyal user base spanning older Windows Phone devices and relatively new Windows 10 Mobile smartphones. The experiment was not a failure by any means, because there are still about 7 million users actively using these devices. But in the grander scheme of things, Microsoft’s mobile ambitions were swept under the carpet. Or so we thought.
And then came Windows 10, with ever greater ambitions of unifying device disparity. The Great Device Divide that put mobile and desktop into separate categories with their own ecosystems of apps was now Microsoft’s new target. And that brings us to what they’ve been working on under a surprisingly thick shroud of secrecy – Andromeda OS.
Andromeda is allegedly a hybrid operating system that handles the need of both desktop and mobile devices. There are many parts to it, such as CShell, which helps render content on different screen types with ease. There’s also Windows 10 on ARM, which is one of the angles they’ve been working.
All of these different parts come together in Andromeda. We first heard about this several months ago when Microsoft was reportedly testing an early version of this new type of hybrid OS.
We pick it up from Microsoft’s announcement at Build in April that Windows 10 Mobile would no longer have a full development slate — pre-release files in Insider builds have moved from the “Redstone 3” bin into a branch called “feature2,” stuck with Redstone 2. We’ve been wondering what this has meant for the mobile OS as it has lacked fuel for excitement for many months now — all we’ve heard from the company is gobbledygook.
Microsoft would give a big reboot to the whole development and go in the direction it should have been in the beginning: A modular, Andromeda OS ( familiar from Google's home ) is launching a working platform that can adapt to the hardware running . In fact, the UWP application layer is all-in-one, and basic system processes are common, only hardware-based layers are developed more sharply separated modules, so actually the same Windows 10 runs on both a computer and a smartphone.
Unfortunately, for present Windows 10 Mobile owners, we do not have much good news, because Microsoft does not plan to upgrade existing devices to the new platform. Although these models will still be repaired in the next year or so, they will be captured at the Redstone 2 release and will continue to run on a development line named " feature2 " until the fast- paced closure of the support.
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