Despite its best efforts, Microsoft hasn’t been able to fill the Windows Store with anywhere close to the number of apps that Apple and Google’s app stores have, but the company isn’t giving up. A recent update to the App Studio has actually made developing a Windows 10 app so easy, you can do it in less than ten minutes without writing a single line of code. Basically, users can modify a handful of pre-made templates to create a functioning app that works on all Windows 10 devices, which may sacrifice customization and innovation, but makes things much easier.
Microsoft has made tweaks to App Studio that allows users who don’t have prior knowledge of code to submit an app in less than 10 minutes. Traditionally, users would need to install Visual Studio and tap out reams of code, but with Microsoft’s new step-by-step process, you can build an app using a series of templates. Users need to create an account, which takes about two minutes, before they can start using it. Once in, you can choose whether to build an app for Windows 10 or 8.1, the latter offering far less customisation. I decided to go with a Hosted Web App and dragged The Next Web’s feed in. Alternatively you can drag content from RSS feeds, Flickr and even YouTube. Although the site looked fairly terrible in portrait (we switched to landscape), you can build in tiles to drag in feeds from elsewhere to make it more personalized. It includes software that will automatically generate screenshots for listing on the Store, and an app-simulator across all devices. It took less than 10 minutes to set the whole thing up and can be pushed on to the store without any hassle. The template is crudely simple, and probably won’t make you a millionaire. But the result is a Universal app that can run on all Windows devices and even Raspberry Pi 2 and IoT hardware.
