2019: The Year in Apps (Premium)

2019 was a confusing year for apps. The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) was declared dead. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) didn’t take off in any meaningful way, again. Mac Catalyst landed with a thud. And Linux apps, inexplicably, were everywhere.

Only people like you and me worry about this stuff, of course. To most users, apps are apps are apps, and how an app is made—or how an app is not made—doesn’t matter in the slightest. What does matter is that the apps users want are available on the platforms they use.

Granted, that’s never been a problem for the most part. But this debate about UWP, PWA, and Catalyst—and about related topics like Kotlin and Swift, Flutter and Xamarin, the return of Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and more—is still very important. Whatever your opinion of the viability of any of these technologies or of the different platforms on which they run, 2019 was also a fascinating year for apps.

It was a year in which apps crossed boundaries, from iPad apps in the Mac App Store (Catalyst) to PWAs in the Microsoft Store. A year in which developers could use environments like Flutter to writes apps that run anywhere on mobile and, soon, anywhere period. A year in which cross-play gaming came into its own, with gamers competing against gamers on other platforms. (Even the latest Call of Duty title allows gamers to compete across Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. This is a revolution.)

For those in the Microsoft world, 2019 may have seemed like another year of retreat. Microsoft gutted UWP by stripping it of all its unique functionality and making it available to developers still using other (mostly older) frameworks, an acknowledgment that its previous strategy failed. PWAs were going to be the next big thing, but we were in a holding pattern all year thanks (I assume) to Microsoft’s switchover to the Chromium codebase in Edge. And Microsoft’s defeat in mobile left it in a weakened position to influence the technologies that developers use in that space.

But each of these setbacks has a silver lining of sorts. UWP’s failure caused Microsoft to finally accept that its own developer base had rejected mobile apps on Windows and wanted that functionality in the environments they continue to rely on. Microsoft’s embrace of Chromium will ultimately speed the availability of PWAs and other web apps, not just on Windows but across platforms. And while Microsoft’s Xamarin platform will never take over on mobile, it does provide a path forward for .NET developers and can sit next to other cross-platform solutions like Flutter and let developers focus more on their solutions than on the differences between platforms.

What this all points to, as we close out 2019, is that the Microsoft apps space is finally where it should have been when Microsoft launched Windows 10 in 2015. That may seem like a pyrrhic victory of sorts, but at least it’s finally happening. And with Windows 10X and Surface Neo arriving in 2020, we’ll see how that sea change impacts app development for that platform. I bet it doesn’t look like the UWP-only dreams of 2014-2015.

And let’s not forget Linux. We may never really see “the year of desktop Linux,” but Microsoft went from adding Linux app support in Windows 10 via the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to adding a full-blown Linux kernel to Windows 10 in WSL 2. There is perhaps no crazier example of worlds colliding in the apps space than this technology.

But Microsoft, of course, isn’t the biggest player in apps. Thanks to their dominant mobile platforms, both Google and Android play bigger roles in apps. Both have stepped up their own cross-platform efforts, Google with Flutter and Android apps on Chrome OS, and Apple with Catalyst and its begrudging support of PWAs. And both provide mammoth online stores that are absolutely packed with apps made with all kinds of languages, frameworks, and environments.

What this all points to, I think, is a general maturation, not just within Microsoft but across the industry. Developers can reach their users wherever they are, using the tools, frameworks, and services that they prefer. And the choices are only expanding. That’s good for developers, and for users. And for the platform makers too, though Apple always seems to need a nudge on that one.

Ultimately, while I’m surprised by the slow pace of PWA and Catalyst usage, I do feel that these kinds of cross-platform solutions have legs, and will become more popular moving forward. Sun’s vision of “write once, run everywhere” isn’t a reality today in 2019. But it could be—and should be—in the near future.