Microsoft officially brings desktop apps to Windows 10 phones

It’s been a long time coming but it looks like it’s finally the start of having a truly unified Windows platform. Microsoft just announced at its WinHEC event in Shenzen that desktop apps are coming to ARM processors—and that means almost all kinds of mobile devices—through its partnership with Qualcomm. These apps aren’t just the touch-friendly Windows Universal Apps. These are the full-fledged versions, meaning you can get access to Office and even Photoshop CC on a Windows phone—and developers don’t even have to do anything.

Microsoft and Qualcomm will be using an emulation process for this but a video shared by The Next Web shows how the system is able to run smoothly on an almost year-old Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor with 4GB of RAM. We don’t expect Microsoft to drop its Universal Windows Platform, especially since these versions are more power efficient, touch-friendly, and scalable than the x86 software. But it will entice people to use Windows 10 phones more and in turn that just might bring more options into the market.