Microsoft abandoned “Project Astoria” for porting Android apps to Windows 10

Microsoft, last year, announced that the developers would be capable of easily porting their apps already built on iOS and Android platforms to the Windows 10 platform to run on Windows devices. Microsoft named the projects as Project Islandwood & Project Astoria for respective platforms.

The Android subsystem was unexpectedly disappeared from the Windows 10 build released last October leaving almost everyone one think what’s happening at Microsoft. Now with the latest official words from the software giant, the Project Astoria has been demolished as a Bridge from Android to Windows platform.

In an official statement via Windows Blog, Microsoft said that the company will instead focus on the one – the iOS Bridge (aka Project Islandwood) which allows developers to port iOS apps to run on Windows platform as Microsoft thinks that having a choice between two Bridge technologies to bring code from other mobile operating systems to Windows could be confusing, and rather is unnecessary.

In another aspect, Microsoft encourages developers to use its recently acquired Xamarin, a mobile development platform provider that lets developers write their apps in one language and then port it easily to different platforms. As believes Microsoft, Xamarin along with the iOS Bridge are good enough when combined with the Web Bridge (for porting web apps) and Project Centennial (for porting existing Win32 and .NET apps) for developers to port their apps to Windows 10 platforms.