Yesterday, as I was sitting down at my desktop trying to think of what to play, I noticed that I had a very significant collection of older games. Games, which you would even be able to install, or which would not run without a hitch. Some part would definitely fail, like sound, for example. As much as I would like to play them – any of these – there will be problems with Windows 10 for the sole reason that they were designed for systems that don’t come along with Windows anymore.
The problem I am discussing above is what an OS needs to provide some particular solution and function to do the job. As the OS evolves and finds no reason to provide that functionality (in favor of a replacement usually) the app will either fail outright or fail partially. I’m not sure which I prefer, but I know I would like it not to fail at all. This is being turned around by Google on Android (along with the Chrome App engine) to combat the fragmentation to some extent.
The giant is starting to move away from baking the services for the favor of OS and for it being part of an addon supplied through Play or Chrome. These services offered by Google are the full package which knows, how to get things done with only the actual output being left to the OS. The advantages of this change are as follows:
- Developers can spend more time working on their applications rather than working on each generation of the OS
The services offer tools so that developers just need to learn one set of instructions - If the services offered to run on multiple operating systems then the apps don’t need to be rewritten for each unique OS. This is a major focus point of the Chrome App engine
- In Android even where the versions are broken further by companies this makes
- it possible to write an app and not worry if it will run correctly.
- Since the apps are made using these services that do not depend on versions they can be considered to be future proof to a large extent.
- On the user side, it is less worry about if the app will run or not
This is the next stage of app development and I hope to see more providers switching to a system like this.
