My Trips user:  The My Trips Live Tile doesn’t work on Windows 10 Mobile
Me: Strange let me look into it.
MS: Yes, you are hitting a bug in Win 10 Mobile for older phone apps
Me: When are you going to fix it?
MS:  Never, please rewrite your apps to work around it.

This was a recent exchange I had regarding a problem with My Trips live tile.  It’s a painful problem for my ardent users of My Trips, many of whom have been using it since I first brought it out for Windows Phone 7 many years ago.

It’s an interesting predicament for me. I appreciate the users of My Trips, but I don’t appreciate being told I need to rewrite part of the app to use new APIs to work around this bug.  Microsoft has always been very focused on backwards compatibility and this flies in the face of that.  Sure, my app code is old.  I wrote it with C# and XAML but back when Windows Phone used a Silverlight app model … so it is not a more modern Windows universal app.

What ticks me off is I have supported the platform for years and created a reasonably popular app that filled one of the app gaps in their ecosystem. You would think that given the widening app gap that MS would bend over backwards to ensure app developers were sticking on the platform.  It seems not. It sounds like there are very few apps hitting this bug and for that reason they are not going to fix it. Although this irritates me, im sure it irritates and frustrates the users more.

For me the equation is pretty simple.  Time to update the app vs. return, and to be honest it doesn’t make sense given the time I would need to put in to change this code.

Side note for those interested on the code changes needed: It’s not a couple of lines of code to change, it’s quite a bit.  It’s changing how the app generates tiles and how it registers for push notifications from Microsoft.

But I am conflicted. Because I know there are still die hard Windows 10 mobile fans out there that will not like me for abandoning the app. That pains me.

I have wanted to update My Trips for Windows 10 (for desktops, tablets etc…) for a while and I would much rather put effort into that. Now that Xamarin is in the MS family and I could quite easily target a version for iOS and Android at the same time whilst sharing 80% of the code.

Now that Xamarin is in the MS family and I could quite easily target a version for iOS and Android at the same time whilst sharing 80% of the code.

So with all this said I am pretty sure I am leaving the My Trips mobile code alone to wither and die.  It’s been a great ride.  I have wanted to bring it to iOS for a long time, especially since I’m an iOS user these days and I have had a bunch of requests for it.  So hopefully I can get that done and keep My Trips an app with a future.

-CJ