Microsoft recently launched two major projects to port Android and iOS apps to Windows 10 as universal apps, using Project Astoria and Project Islandwood, respectively. However, the company gradually discontinued Project Astoria support, and we are no longer able to port Android apps to Windows 10 Mobile.
Project Islandwood has yet to be widely available on devices, though a few developers gained access to its tools a few months ago when Microsoft was seeking developers to port their iOS apps to Windows 10 as universal apps.
As mentioned, some developers gained early access to Project Islandwood. Now, a developer named David Burela has published a video on YouTube showing how he ported an iOS game to Windows 10 using Project Islandwood in just 5 minutes, which was surprisingly easy and fast.
In this video, David Burela demonstrates how to use the Windows Bridge for iOS to convert an iOS Xcode project (written in Objective-C) into a Windows 10 app using Visual Studio.
He starts by downloading the bridge tool from GitHub, choosing an older release to avoid issues with the latest version. For the demo, he uses the source code of a game called Canabalt, an open-source, post-apocalyptic running game.
After downloading and extracting the bridge and game files, he uses the Visual Studio importer tool to convert the iOS project into a Visual Studio solution. Once loaded in Visual Studio, the game can be built and run as a Windows 10 app, with features like resizing, sound, and touch support.
To show that code editing works, he updates the text in the game’s “About” screen to include his name.
For those wondering, he also tried another called Granted, and it does not feature 3D graphics or particularly advanced visuals. Let us know which app or game you’d like to see from iOS on your Windows 10 devices—share your thoughts in the comments below.
