Yes, There is a distinction between fully sandboxed apps aka “modern apps”, “store apps” “metro apps” “WinRT apps” …and legacy apps. Recently MS introduced “Project Centennial”, where legacy apps can now be wrapped up in a semi-sandboxed state and distributed from the app store. This is achieved by running your standard installer through a process that captures and “virtualises” the installation process. This “packaged” app will now run sandboxed and calls to the registry and filesystem are virtualized to a folder within the installation folder. The installer is prohibited from writing any file outside its instal folder. (this supports very clean un-installation). Your app does, however, have permission to call “legacy” Win32 APIs and access nearly anything it used to. The app must then pass a certification process at Microsoft to be allowed into the app store.
Frankly, it’s a bit painful.
Please see here, where I’ve made notes on the approach I’m following; I seem to be making progress - cautiously optimistic that I’ll have 2 Juce-based apps approved.
Pete
We’ve now had two apps approved by Microsoft for the Windows 10 store, both created using Juce, both submitted using the process in the link I provided above. They’ll be uploaded to the Windows 10 store later today, and should be live in a few days. Pete
Hi Folks!
For those who are interested, the Wotja X apps are finally fully live on the Windows 10 Store. You can take a look via the links in our Download page here (there are free versions if you want a play). You’ll see that we also have versions on both Google Play and the Amazon App Store…
https://intermorphic.com/wotja/x/#downloads
In summary, this did take quite a bit of figuring-out, and it takes a long time to get everything approved. Furthermore, the Microsoft app submission initial review process is super-slow; and it can take days to get updates live! But it has very much been worth the effort.
Devs: just FYI in case this feedback is of use: we have a number of Wotja X variants for each platform, to allow for Free-with-IAP and Full-feature versions (currently: 2 for iOS, 2 for macOS, 2 for Windows, 3 for Android…) we have to maintain each project separately outside of ProJucer. Actually, I’ve not been able to get ProJucer to work automatically with some of our specific requirements, including:
- embedded private frameworks (we have a lot of Swift code in here, for example) for iOS/macOS
- Windows 10 apps having a “wrapper” UWP app (see my above notes) for the Windows 10 store deployment to work
- our apps use HockeyApp, so we have to (say) patch-up the generated .java files to put-in the right hooks for Android
This isn’t a criticism of Juce, but I’m merely flagging-up to prospective developers not to panic; you might simply need to embrace the processing of using ProJucer to “seed” your projects, and then get used to maintaining the projects manually for each platform.
All-in-all, Juce has been great for Wotja X. Once Accessibility support arrives, it really is going to be something super.
Best wishes to all,
Pete
The Wotja downloads page is now here: https://intermorphic.com/wotja/download/
I don’t appear able to edit my earlier post - maybe it is too old now!
Pete
Hi Folks,
Addendum: I’ve finally been able to add crash reporting to Windows 10 Store apps created with Juce - please see Windows 10 Store app - crash reporting for more info.
Pete