Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday November 17 2015, @11:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-news dept.

Microsoft's plan to run Android applications on Windows phones and tablets, known as "Project Astoria", may be indefinitely shelved, or at least delayed:

Microsoft has sidelined its plan to allow Windows 10 devices to run Android apps before it could do any serious damage, according to a report. Daniel Rubino at the Windows Central blog gathered some convincing evidence that Microsoft's Project Astoria has been wound down, while the runtime allowing the Android-on-Win10 magic to work has disappeared. Microsoft declined to elaborate on its fate, but stressed that developers had "other tools offer great options for developers".

The plan to bridge the "app gap" allowing Android binaries to run on on Windows 10 mobile devices was famously, and not unjustifiably, described* as a "suicide note" by Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott when its existence was widely discussed back in April. The fear was that the existence of an Android runtime on Windows 10 phones and tablets would remove the incentive for developers to create native Windows applications. Windows would become a device driver layer and as a consequence, Microsoft's best chance to lure users into its d̶a̶t̶a̶-̶s̶l̶u̶r̶p̶i̶n̶g̶ cloud consumer services such as Cortana would disappear.

[...] In September, the Astoria forums went silent. Microsoft no longer briefs developers about it and the runtime has been removed from the latest builds of Windows 10 Mobile. Rubino suggests that it was labour intensive, with as many as 80 developers involved, which can't have helped. But it's only part of the picture. If you've followed the travails of the BlackBerry 10 (BB10) operating system, it's a vivid demonstration of Thurrott's "suicide prediction". The essential dilemma is this: the better you make your runtime, the less incentive there is to create native applications.

Project Islandwood, a similar Microsoft effort for iOS that requires Objective-C apps to be recompiled, appears intact. The Astoria team reportedly had 60-80 Microsoft devs working on it, compared to just 5 for Islandwood. The recompilation rather than emulation approach would also make piracy more difficult. Projects Westminster and Centennial, for porting "web apps" and legacy Win32 desktop applications respectively, also remain on track.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @12:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @12:06AM (#264623)

    Interesting take. If they do nothing, it'll sink into oblivion. If they do something, it'll take longer to sink.

    Could the argument really be how to be a 'good corporate citizen' like in Adam Smith's Capitolism, or Game-theory like 'how to horde all the nuts'? If the free market isnt into nuts, why horde them?

    Bridging this kind of gap with inferior products is what M$ has done in the past - internet exploiter, zune.

    Its sad to see they are removing this from their 'EEE' motto and are fortifying themselves into a virtual corner.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @01:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @01:21AM (#264638)

    yes, it is interesting, and balance. by balance, I mean, you live by globalization, as a consumer of labor. Sucks for me. You also die by it, everythings connected. Sure, it's not the same market, but the underlying pressure is the same, from an economics perspective. For a while, everything was sufficiently uniform that I could write against one library with small tweaks and target all of the important platforms. Mobile bucked the trend, but them days are a coming again.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:42AM (#264704)

    That dude had insights we didn't even know about??
    He was giving advice on how to select a country's seat of government?

    inferior products

    "Microsoft is an incredibly successful empire, built on the premise of market dominance with low-quality goods." --Richard Clarke, former White House advisor

    -- gewg_