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Ask HN: Any Non-trivial UWP apps out there?

by photawe on 6/10/20, 3:02 PM with 1 comments

A lot of times I feel like I'm the only UWP developer out there. Clearly, there are a lot of UWP developers out there, but to create complicated apps using UWP, and dealing with all the hurdles, and not actually giving up, that seems to be pretty much no one.

I really really hope I'm wrong, but there are times I feel I just wanna scream.

(Fyi, my app is just a tad higher than 100K LOC)

Why am I saying this?

Microsoft is marketing this stuff as "the next big thing", but it feels pretty much as just empty words. In other words, they don't seem to actually believe what they're saying. Except for the "Windows 10 Settings" and the "Feedback Hub", which in terms of UI are beyond trivial, I don't really see any UWP app they developed that could could as "decently complex".

So, it's just marketing, but nothing to back it up. I've looked at the examples and all that stuff, they all look decent, but in terms of complexity, they're all simple simple simple.

The Microsoft Store is worse than a bad joke. Sure, there are some apps there, but most of them are just a few controls cobbled together, a few pages, a few animations and that's it. I'm asking about hard-core, complex UI, and see that UWP is a winner.

About the docs: in practice, no matter what the docs say, you just need to test it and see if it works. And even if it does, you're not really sure it'll work on the customer's computer.

I've encountered so many issues in the last almost-one-year that I don't know how a sane person could truly develop a non-trivial UWP app. Just as I say "async" - if you're porting a WPF app to UWP, because of async, it's likely better to simply rewrite it from scratch.

So, anyone doing non-trivial UWP? How many LOC? How many users? Successful? I'm really really curious.

  • by photawe on 6/10/20, 3:04 PM

    Extra note (did not fit in the original submission)

    To me, UWP is definitely a good thing, but it's soooo unpolished, the docs are so trivial (lots of documentation that simply mimics the API itself), everything looks like it's just been made to look good for some presentation, but beyond that, you're on your own. Not to mention they made that great "sandbox" without asking any one, no one really likes it, everything is 10x harder than without the sandbox, giving feedback to MS is close to impossible, and in the incredibly lucky case they MIGHT listen, it will probably be months before they develop a solution (which would work only from that Windows version onwards).