Developer Converts iOS Game to Windows 10

In a show of support for Microsoft’s iOS bridge technologies, a developer has taken an ancient iOS game and ported it without issues to Windows 10. The process, he says, took under 5 minutes.

So kudos to David Burela for exciting the Windows fan base. I’m just not sure this proves much. That is, the vast majority of iOS apps and games will in fact require a significant investment of time and work before they are fully ported to Windows 10 because they use iOS-specific system calls that are not natively handled by Windows 10. But the game Burela ported is so old, and of such dubious history, that it really doesn’t make the point.

The game is called Canabalt. It was originally written as an online Flash game, and was later ported to iOS. Which is of course the issue: It wasn’t originally an iOS title, so it wasn’t written to that platform and doesn’t use many platform-specific features. So porting it to Windows 10 with the iOS Bridge is straightforward. Indeed, Burela spends more time in the accompanying video showing the view how to install iOS Bridge than he does explaining how to use it in Visual Studio. (Canabalt’s authors made the game’s source code available, which makes this whole thing possible.)

Canabalt was also ported to Android, by the way. Maybe someone could port that code base to Windows 10 too. Ah. Right. 🙂

Anyway, this is interesting as a proof of concept. But I’d like to see something a bit more complex. Perhaps we’ll see some of that at BUILD this year.