Kodi Official UWP App is now available for Xbox One

Kodi, the popular app used for playing media from Network devices to local storage, now has an app for the Xbox One. Plex has been helping out here with the actions till now, but now you can get the complete experience with its UWP app.

Interesting to note that the developers behind Kodi had to port their classic desktop code to make it UWP, which took a lot of time, especially when it came to supporting the third-party apps. They had to use the Desktop Bridge program to get it done and looks like it actually helped.

Suddenly (probably due to some strange cosmological alignment) Microsoft announced that it would start to align all devices towards a common Windows 10 platform. Our eyes started twitching and the team became anxious if that would mean the long-lived dream would become a reality again. Then we woke up again, shook our heads and convinced ourselves it was not going to happen as Kodi by that time was becoming too complex to port over. Even migrating the code over for regular Windows 10 devices to the so called Universal Windows Platform (UWP) was thought to be out of reach. Even the Desktop Bridge (Project Centennial) version for getting regular applications to the store was thought to be too difficult.

On June 2016 we were proved wrong as we got contacted by developers who had succeeded with relative ease. With some minor adjustments we were able to get the 32-bit version of Kodi packaged and listed on Windows Store in September 2016. You can read more about that story here: Kodi goes Windows Store. With that milestone done we though that’s where the story ends.

That said, there are limitations because of the whole UWP thing, and developers are still learning on how they can get the exact feature to UWP App. They note

Network support is limited to only NFS:// shares. No access to the Blu-ray drive to start the disc or even an attached storage drive. There might still be problems with certain general python modules that are used by add-ons and we are finding and reporting them to the developers as testing progresses.