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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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @07:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @07:30AM (#264741)

    Add a compatibility layer API that lets you target WP and Android.

    Now at least devs are 1) using .NET to code apps and 2) creating WP native apps as well.