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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: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday November 18 2015, @11:43AM
A Miraluka could have seen this coming. Microsoft's Android effort had fail written all over it from day 1. I was eager to try MS's new emulator, thinking it couldn't be worse than Google's slow one. Wrong! Their emulator trashed my machine. I could not use the Internet after I installed it. How does an emulator do that? Even Google's emulator isn't that bad. MS's emulator takes over your ethernet card without telling you or giving you the option to not do it. It's almost impossible to get rid of. How do you screw up an emulator? It's like screwing up mashed potatoes, you boil the water and pour in the packet. What can go wrong? If MS can't even get their emulator to work without trashing your development machine, how are they going to go further in their plan to do, um, what were they trying to do? Run Android apps on Windows? They should ask BlackBerry how well that plan works. Or doesn't work. This whole effort was doomed from the start.
I have little hope for their iOS thing, too, because to recompile iOS apps they'd have to supply the whole Cocoa framework and other stuff. Yes, there's a GNU Objective-C compiler out there, but it lags Apple's language support badly (at least the last time I looked at it) and had no GUI framework support, or other frameworks like Core Data that people use. I think we'll be seeing this effort fail soon, too.
This is why Apple would be crazy to release an open-source Cocoa framework with their open-source Swift LLVM front-end. MS would use it.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Wednesday November 18 2015, @09:42PM
You just screwed up mashed potatoes right there.