A new report from WindowsUnited.de suggests Microsoft is moving Skype away from UWP. Instead, the communications platform will be based on Facebook’s React Native framework. Indeed, Microsoft will apparently be rolling out a beta very soon. By switching to React Native, Skype for Windows 7, 8, Linux, and Mac will no be based on Electron anymore, and will lose UWP on Windows 10. The question is whether this represents Microsoft beginning a wider shift to React Native, or whether this is just for Skype? Microsoft has its own Xamarin platform for cross-platform development tools, so is the company abandoning UWP? I’ve seen that offered as a reason Microsoft is taking Skype to React Native. That’s not really the case as Microsoft and Facebook have previously said that React Native and UWP can work together. Using React allows developers to create applications for multiple platforms and easily move them to Windows with little recoding.
Support from UWP
As for Universal Windows Platform developers, they get another way to create applications. Microsoft already supplies several solutions, such as JavaScript: “The new UWP support extends the reach of these native apps to a new market of 270 million active Windows 10 devices, and the opportunity to reach beyond mobile devices, to PCs, and even the Xbox One and HoloLens. For Windows app developers, it also means an opportunity to embed React Native components into their existing UWP apps and to leverage the developer tools and programming paradigms that React Native offers.” So, in other words Microsoft has been discussing leveraging React Native for some time.
