Difference between Windows 8, Windows 8 RT, Windows Phone 8

Question

We have an app written for iOS and Android. How we are thinking over supporting it for some Windows platforms. I can see there are three modern mobile Windows platforms at now:

• Windows 8
• Windows RT
• Windows Phone 8

As I understand, Windows 8 and Windows RT differs only in that former is for Intel and latter is for ARM. But what about Windows Phone 8? If we port our app to Windows 8 (and Windows RT), would it run on Windows Phone 8? Or vice-versa? What is relation between these platforms? What percentage of smartphones/tablets does run any of these platforms?

Answer 1

The Windows platforms:

You are right, Windows 8 Apps and Windows 8 RT Apps are (in the most common cases) the same so you usually don't have to worry that your Windows 8 App does not run on a Windows 8 RT device.

The Windows Phone platform is slightly different. You can reuse very much of your code from the Windows 8 App but most controls lay in different libraries and some behaviours change between these platforms. By now!

Some days ago at //build conference Microsoft introduced Windows Phone 8.1 and much has become easier!

Cross platform Windows development:

If you start developming for mobile Windows platforms as Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone now you should definately take a look at the new Universal App Model.

Since the upcoming Windows Phone 8.1 Update, both platforms share the same code base. With the Universal App Model you can share your code between both platforms and only have to define different layouts for the GUI. You can compile your project both for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 then, which is really cool!

Both the Windows 8.1 Update and Windows Phone 8.1 Update are available for every Windows Phone 8 respectively Windows 8 device. So you don't have to worry to exclude useres when "only" developing for the latest version of both platforms.

Percentage of smartphones/tablets users on these platforms:

If you use the Universal App Model there is no question whether to develop for Windows 8 OR Windows Phone 8. You automatically develop for both. Users will love you for that!

For more information read this blog post.

Hope that helps :)

Answer 2

Windows 8 and Windows 8 RT both support Windows Store Apps without any additional work. You write it once, publish it to Windows Store, and it's downloadable on both OS's.

It used to be that you needed to develop a separate app for Windows Phone 8 because it has a separate app store and essentially a separate OS (although parts of it are shared with W8). You could share some of the core logic code but the UI parts needed to be different since WP8 has different resolutions and different controls. And you'd compile different packages depending on your target OS.

But it's a very recent development that supposedly you're able to now develop once and target all 3 of these OS's, although I have not tried this yet. You can find more details here:

http://readwrite.com/2014/04/03/microsoft-universal-windows-app-store-developers-unified-code-base#awesm=~oCPndkNofb18zX