Hello Corona team,
Since this post - http://coronalabs.com/blog/2014/03/13/windows-phone-8-update/ - we haven’t received any news on Corona apps working on Windows Phone.
Could you update us on the progress? When can we expect this feature rolled out to production?
Thanks!
Engineering working on it. They are getting close to a preview but we don’t have an ETA.
Rob
Thanks you, Rob!
Please keep us updated, a lot of people are looking forward to this functionality!
was too long…
I fear we’ll have missed the boat by the time it’s ready and the market will be just as saturated as ios & google play.
Hi Rob,
first of all thanks for letting us know the team is working on it.
Even if there isn’t an ETA, please could the Corona team give us an indicative period?
Say mid autumn or christmas time or whatever.
Some of us work with third parties, for example to provide apps, and knowing when we can start promising Windows Phone apps to our clients would help us HUGELY to plan and keep our business going.
Please don’t get me wrong, I love Corona, appreciate all your hard work and understand the difficulties of getting such a huge feature out, just a rough time frame would be something.
Also, any chance to get back the ancient Corona Roadmap page on the website?
Thanks again
Emily
We have seeded an early alpha build out to a few developers to get some feedback. We are going to be expanding the private beta over the next few days. I can’t give you any window because this is an a very complex process.
Woohoo!
Rob any chance to get into the private beta?
Can we apply?
Thanks!
SL
I’ve waited so long and now is the frustration! 
Be patient ; this sort of thing is horribly complicated to do. Testing is extensive to put it mildly. If it is ‘rushed’ and it generates incompatible / broken code it will cause chaos.
I’m really looking forward to this! The original announcement said 2014, so that gives them another 5 months lol
It’s in closed beta now, but there are many features and performance enhancements needed still. Engineering is working as hard as they can on it.
Rob
You really don’t want them to push this out too early. If they add a new API and there’s a big bug, it’s fixable.
The problem with Windows Phone release is all the people who have Corona apps on the markets (god knows how many that is !) then think, right, I can release this now on Microsoft’s market. So the consequence of this release is likely to be a mini-flood of applications produced by Corona. If there is a problem beyond the trivial, a lot of those applications may not work, or may have faults which damages both Corona, potentially and the market. It is not beyond possibility that if such a problem is significant, Corona apps could be banned from the Windows Phone marketplace because they are ‘more trouble than they are worth’, or their release limited in some way.
When you are writing a library for cross platform development it helps if you make it as tight as possible. Some parts of Corona are, and some aren’t quite so neatly done. I used to write emulators before it got boring, and it is a similar sort of problem, you have all kinds of little cases where a programmer has done something outrageously weird but legal within the API, and it has to work. You would be amazed at the stupid things some programmers do.
Microsoft is desperate for developers to release apps on their marketplace. Instead of banning or limiting them, I think they would offer help to the Corona folks in any way they could. Microsoft is the underdog of mobile and they have put billions of dollars to try and compete in the space.
I agree that it should be tested and well vetted, but let’s not get paranoid here! Opportunities must be seized at the right moment. And in the case of software, sooner is almost always better than later.
An interesting snippet from an article about cross platform efforts by Microsoft with middleware companies. Hurry Corona, I feel like we are last in line!!!
Make cross-platform technology easier and more capable
We’ve also been working for developers who may not already be on the Windows platform by supporting a mix of languages, runtimes, frameworks, and protocols that run across devices. Middleware partners like Unity have helped developers bring thousands of titles to the Windows Store. In a newly released beta version, Unity is delivering support for Windows Phone 8.1, including universal Windows apps.
Microsoft Open Technologies also works with various open source communities to contribute code to popular C++ frameworks and optimize them for Windows devices. For example, Windows Store supports Cocos2D-X, openFrameworks,OpenCV, Cinder, andOgre3D apps. Box2D and Bullet also have joined the Windows Store. jQuery now fully supports Windows Runtime, so web developers can build Windows 8 apps reusing their existing code and skills. Developers who use HTML5 to build cross-platform apps for iOS and Android with tools like Apache Cordova will find it easy to port their apps to Windows.
In fact, we’re taking a much more pragmatic approach to the web in general. We know that HTML is a critical cross-platform technology. Windows Phone 8.1 brings the same powerful hardware-accelerated IE11 HTML engine in Windows 8.1 to the phone. We’ve made great strides in extending IE to developers by focusing on open standards. Now we want to focus even more on interoperability. We already support WebGL and other technologies, such as media streaming extensions for adaptive streaming scenarios.
Today we’re also announcing that Microsoft Open Technologies has brought the Windows Library for JavaScript (WinJS) cross-platform apps and is open sourcing it under the Apache 2.0 license. Find the source code on GitHub. Use this powerful Windows development framework to build high-quality web apps across a variety of browsers and devices beyond Windows, including Chrome, Firefox, Android, and iOS.
Engineering working on it. They are getting close to a preview but we don’t have an ETA.
Rob
Thanks you, Rob!
Please keep us updated, a lot of people are looking forward to this functionality!
was too long…