Edible Apple

This fall, Microsoft will unveil its own version of a mobile app store for Windows Mobile phones, aptly called the Windows Marketplace.  Clearly, Microsoft will have a lot of work on its hands as it attempts to compete with the already mature iTunes App Store which currently boasts more than 65,000 applications.

In an effort to woo developers over to its platform, Microsoft is offering prizes to developers who submit top-notch applications, and most recently, it published a blog post attempting to illustrate just how easy it is for developers to port their iPhone apps over to the Windows Mobile platform.

Using the iPhone app Amplitude as a case study, the blog post describes the app developers experiences in porting his app over to Windows Mobile.

In his conclusion, Thompson credits the Windows Mobile Developer Community for helping him resolve the issues he encountered along the road, stating that: “The large development community, both within Microsoft and outside, and the various whitepapers, blogs, virtual labs, websites, and other online documentation, offered a wealth of information that provided direction and greatly facilitated problem resolution. The only real challenge was assuring total portability between screens, and that was assured by utilizing the concept of aspect ratios.”

So basically, porting apps over isn’t that easy, but developers can rest-assured that there are an inordinate number of resources “both within Microsoft and outside” to help them along the way.  That doesn’t sound too encouraging to us.

Amplitude developer Luke Thompson’s full report on what porting apps between the iPhone and Windows Mobile was like can be found over here.