Bank of America app for Windows 10 Mobile coming this summer

Bank of America is internally testing a Windows 10 Mobile version of their mobile banking app and plans to release it this summer, according to a tweet from the Bank of America Help account.

Last week we reported, citing a story on mspoweruser.com, that Bank of America was returning to Windows Phone, now called Windows 10 Mobile, along with other banks and Starbucks.

The mspoweruser.com story showed a photograph of an internal Bank of America screen which stated that the app would be available on March 28. That date has come and gone. In response to a tweet by me about the app, the Bank of America Help account said "[w]e've started a limited internal rollout of our Windows 10 Mobile Banking app and are working to bring it to you this summer."

Chase and Bank of America both stopped Windows Phone development last January and withdrew their apps from the Windows Phone store. In retrospect, it may be that they abandoned the old Windows Phone architecture in favor of a Universal Windows App that would run on both Windows 10 Mobile and Desktop.

There were clues last year to indicate that Bank of America wasn't done with Windows. In August Bank of America CTO David Reilly said, in an interview with InformationWeek, that the Bank was committed to a full-scale deployment of Windows 10 internally "as early as we can." He cited the ease of the upgrade as compared to previous Windows deployments and the consistency of the user interface across devices.

Microsoft's emphasis on Universal Windows Apps was on full display today at the Build 2016 developer conference in San Francisco. The company showed, for example, Universal Apps running on Xbox and Windows Desktop and a tool to migrate Win32 programs to UWA. The same advantages should accrue to Windows 10 Mobile, but Microsoft isn't spending any time emphasizing it.