Port Apps From iPhone To Windows Phone 7

There s this ever-lasting mobile phone OS war clouding over the telecom market all over the world. With the bigwigs like iOS, Android and Google incessantly battling up in the OS arena to come out victorious, they are not alone in this. Another OS giant is trying enough to make its presence felt amongst the masses – the Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform. And one important aspect that make or mar the success of any mobile OS is the quantity and quality of apps that runs on them – and that’s where the Windows Phone  7 OS is lacking behind so far. Now Microsoft is looking to rectify the same.

Microsoft has addressed the problem by making it easy for developers to bring/port their popular iPhone applications to Windows Phone 7. Microsoft has now launched an iPhone/iOS to Windows Phone 7 API mapping tool that will help the developers to translate their applications to the Windows phone 7 API more easily. Microsoft’s new porting tool tries to break down the barriers usually associated with taking an app from one platform and porting it to another by giving developers an easy way to take iOS API calls and map them straight to existing Windows Phone 7 APIS.

Photo Credit : www.redmondpie.com

With the launch of the tool, iPhone devs could grab their apps and look into the equivalent classes, methods and notification events in WP7. Moreover, code samples would allow developers to migrate iOS code to the equivalent C# code

Microsoft is also providing a 90+ pages “Windows Phone 7 Guide for iPhone Application Developers” white paper to get developers up and running, and avoiding any sort of mistake in the process.

One thing’s for sure – Microsoft is damn serious this time around with WP7 and clearly recognizes that the key to a successful mobile operating system is a store full of good quality applications. With Apple’s App Store and Android’s Market clearly stealing all the cake, Microsoft has some catching up to do and this new tool could well prove out to be a very important weapon in this OS warfare.

Download the Windows Phone API Mapping Tool.