14 DAY TRIAL // Visual Studio 2019 launches this April, and one of the highlights is improved support for UWP apps, which Microsoft continues to bet big on as part of its modern Windows push.
Naturally, UWP apps are developed to support more than PCs, and phones have previously been a key part of this concept.
As we all know, Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile are both dead, and Microsoft has already pushed its mobile platform to maintenance mode. This is the last year of security updates, after which Windows phones would be gone for good.
While Visual Studio 2019 is technically capable of helping developers create UWP apps, Microsoft has recently pulled support for Windows 10 Mobile from this product. All because phones aren’t part of Microsoft’s long-term vision.
Bye-bye, Windows phones!
In the release notes of Visual Studio 2019, Microsoft says the following (as spotted by Jeremy Sinclair via WU):
“Deployment to Windows Mobile devices is no longer supported in Visual Studio 2019. Attempts to deploy to a Windows 10 Mobile device will result in an error saying ‘Deployment to Windows Mobile devices is not supported in Visual Studio 2019.’ If you need to continue working on an application for Windows 10 Mobile devices, continue to use Visual Studio 2017.”
Microsoft has recently recommended against sticking with Windows 10 Mobile, telling users to switch to Android or iPhone. With Windows 10 Mobile set to go dark later this year, the software giant is working at full speed on improving its Android and iOS apps, all with the purpose of making this transition more seamless for its users.
In the meantime, everyone keeps dreaming about a potential Surface Phone that would see daylight this year, but as it turns out, this project has evolved into Andromeda, a multi-form factor device that has little in common with phones. The device is likely to run full Windows 10 and be focused on productivity, rather than on communications.