Microsoft releases App Analysis Tool for Windows Bridge for iOS (Project Islandwood)

Mark Coppock

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Microsoft continues to be invested in convincing iOS developers to port their apps to the Universal Windows Platform. The primary tool for doing so remains the Windows Bridge for iOS, an open-source project that makes it easier to create UWP apps that utilize iOS APIs and Objective-C code and run on Windows 10 devices. Today, Microsoft has announced on the Windows blog a new utility to help iOS developers decide if their app was a good candidate for conversion, the iOS App Analysis tool.

According to Microsoft:

We want to make it as easy as possible to get started with the bridge – but until now, even finding out if your app was a good match for the bridge was a multi-step process that included downloading the SDK from GitHub, setting up Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015, generating a Visual Studio project for your iOS app, and finally running your code.

For the past few months, the iOS bridge team has been soliciting iOS app packages – called IPAs – from our developer community to help test and flesh out the App Analysis tool, and we’re happy to announce it’s ready.

Starting today, you can use the App Analysis tool to immediately get a breakdown of what parts of your app are compatible with the bridge, giving you a good estimate of how much work would be required to turn your iOS app into a UWP app. And since the tool is web-based, there are no downloads and no installs required – just upload your IPA and you’re ready to go.

Essentially, the tool looks at an app and return information on which frameworks and classes are support by the Windows Bridge for iOS. The results will let a developer know how much work will be required to port an app using the bridge, as in the sample image below.

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Windows Bridge for iOS App Analysis Tool results.

In addition, the tool will provide some additional assistance on how to proceed:

Where possible, the tool will also provide actionable feedback for unsupported items. For instance, if you used Apple’s MapKit framework in your iOS app (which is currently unsupported by the bridge), you’ll get a recommendation to try using Bing Maps and a XAML map control, along with a link to a sample project and tutorial showing you how to do so. Similarly, if you use third-party libraries that are partially supported, you’ll get feedback on how to incorporate their functionality into your bridged app.

The blog post provides all of the details on how to utilize the tool, and it’s well worth an iOS developer’s time. Access the App Analysis tool here, and make sure you’re on the latest bridge release version. The project’s wiki provides even more information.