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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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @06:12AM
They should have gone the other way around -- port the windows phone API to Android.
Android is really just linux with a propriety blob of services from Google. Amazon has a similar proprietary blob of services for their Fire tablets and phone.
MS should port the windows phone API to android and make it super easy for developers to use it on Android. No half-assing it, make it a first class implementation of the API with all the development tools. But the dev tools will also make it super easy to target both android and native windows phone. Make it as easy as ticking a check box at the compile step.
Then any app using the winphone API on android is effectively a free native windows phone app too. It seems pretty dumb that MS didn't take this route, it would totally fit their "embrace, extend, extinguish" model. Instead they tried to clone Google's closed-source android blob of services. That was dumb, Google can screw them at any time just by pushing a new version out.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday November 18 2015, @10:21AM
Uhhh because nobody would use it? Android has enough marketshare to practically be a monopoly while WinPhone has sub 5%, so what good would having the WinPhone API on Android had done? If a dev is so poor they can't get a WinPhone to code on (last I checked you could get quad core WinPhones for $100 USD) I don't think its gonna be a dev MSFT is interested in and what is hurting MSFT right now isn't coding environments, its APPS.
Go to the Windows Store on a WinPhone some time, their selection is just shite, it really is. There is a real dearth of quality apps on the platform, even worse than the Windows Store in Win 8/8.1/10 and that is really saying something. if they could have run Android apps natively that would have at least in the short term fixed the app issue but IMHO it shows MSFT under Nadella is being run even worse than Ballmer as while Ballmer tried to relive history Nadella has obviously forgotten it.
Remember OS/2? They sold themselves as "A better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows"...what happened? Devs said "sheeit, if the DOS and Windows programs run on OS/2 why should I write OS/2 programs when I could just write the Windows one and be done?" and it ended up with OS/2 having no programs that actually took advantage of their OS, leaving them a bad clone with poor compatibility. If this would have come to fruition the same would have happened here, WinPhone development would have instantly died and MSFT would have been stuck constantly being seen as the Android clone with compatibility issues. Stupid.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:00PM
> what good would having the WinPhone API on Android had done?
MS can only win by providing more value. That means a better development environment, better links to all of MS's enterprise software, etc. Nobody develops for actual windows phones because nobody owns any so no matter how much better value winphone provides nobody gives a shit. But if MS were to provide better value on Android then they get access to all of the android phones out there and the #1 reason to avoid developing for winphone goes away.