14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has been working on its vision of complete OS convergence for quite a while now and the first results have already appeared, but it seems that Microsoft is also trying to do the same and it has called it Universal Apps.
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, started talking about platform convergence a long time ago, and the first efforts towards this goal have already been made. Just remember that Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu for Android have already been presented as working technologies for some time now.
The true convergence that Mark Shuttleworth is talking about hasn't arrived yet because it's about having the same codebase on all the platforms. Microsoft introduced the concept of Universal Apps during the BUILD 2014 developer conference in San Francisco, but as you can see from the name itself, it is just about the apps.
Microsoft is only thinking about app convergence, having the same codebase for an app that is running on different platforms, but Canonical has a much wider view. It plans to have the same codebase for the entire operating system. This means that users will have just one OS to install, no matter the platform.
This kind of integration will also help the developers to make apps, regardless of the platform. This convergence concept is already working on some apps and users can see for themselves right now.
Also, during the BUILD 2014 developer conference, David Treadwell, Microsoft CVP of Operating Systems Group, made some statements that are not entirely true. Perhaps they are true only in the confines of the Windows ecosystem.
“Yet today there’s no easy way to create apps that work across all form factors and all of us want the same app experience across all devices,” said David Treadwell. Maybe it's not possible on Windows, but Ubuntu developers and members of the Linux community have already been working on convergent apps for quite some time.
The solution is very simple. Canonical has put together an Ubuntu SDK that allows developers to make apps capable of running on multiple platforms. It's not something that will happen (maybe) before the launch of Windows 9 in 2015. It's happening now.
You can't really blame Microsoft for thinking about convergence. Mark Shuttleworth has also said a couple of times that Apple and Microsoft have the same goal, but Canonical is much farther ahead than any other company and its convergence vision will be ready well before anyone else's.
