Microsoft Kills Project For Porting Android Apps To Windows 10: Find Out Why

Microsoft has officially announced that it has killed Project Astoria, a feature that would let developers port Android apps to Windows 10. The Redmond giant had first announced the project at the 2015 Build developer conference.

According to Windows Central, Project Astoria was introduced alongside another ambitious venture called Project Islandwood that allowed iOS app developers to bring their apps to the Windows 10 platform. The Redmond giant will be continuing Project Islandwood.

The Windows 10 Mobile build 10549 that arrived in October 2015 did not feature Project Astoria’s Android subsystem. However, the Windows 10 Mobile preview builds that were launched earlier featured it.

Kevin Gallo who pioneers the program management for the Windows Developer Platform team, wrote on the official Windows blog, "We received a lot of feedback that having two Bridge technologies to bring code from mobile operating systems to Windows was unnecessary, and the choice between them could be confusing.”

He further stated the reason behind canceling Project Astoria: "We have carefully considered this feedback and decided that we would focus our efforts on the Windows Bridge for iOS and make it the single Bridge option for bringing mobile code to all Windows 10 devices, including Xbox and PCs. For those developers who spent time investigating the Android Bridge, we strongly encourage you to take a look at the iOS Bridge and Xamarin as great solutions."

Xamarin was recently acquired by Microsoft for an undisclosed amount. Xamarin has made tools for building apps that share common code for different mobile platforms like iOS, Android and Windows. The other bridges, Westminster, which allows developers to port web apps to Windows, and Centennial, which allowing porting of Win32 apps to Windows, are active.