Microsoft stops working on 'Windows Bridge for Android'

Microsoft is discontinuing Project Astoria, an effort announced previous year to bring Google Android mobile apps to its Universal Windows Apps fold.

At the same time, purchasing Xamarin also falls in line with the strategy of building a "mobile-first, cloud-first world", as Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has been promoting for years.

Microsoft announced that it's killed off Project Astoria, its development tool for porting Android apps to Windows.

According to Kevin Gallo, Director of Software Engineering in the company, it was completely unnecessary to have two bridge technologies working together to bring code from other OS to Windows Mobile, which is why the company pulled the plug on Astoria. Xamarin's tools allow developers to port applications written in C# to iOS and Android.

With Lumia sales declining and Microsoft's not planning to produce more handsets, it's pretty clear now that the end of Windows Phone is near.

The price paid by Microsoft for privately-owned Xamarin was not released, but industry speculation suggested it was somewhere between $400mln and $500mln.

Microsoft will now focus on improving the iOS Bridge instead, and is urging developers to use this to port their apps. One of the issues with Xamarin adoption was cost. .NET developers already had to invest in Visual Studio tools, and using Xamarin Studio meant additional costs.

Xamarin was founded in Cambridge, but co-founder and CEO Nat Friedman soon moved the company headquarters to the San Francisco area to be closer to the software developers who were its target users. The reference to Xamarin isn't completely insane but this is a way to create an app that runs on Windows, iOS and Android and doesn't help much with the problem of getting an existing Android app to run under Windows. The two projects (Astoria and Islandwood) took very different approaches to the compatibility question, but Astoria made quick progress out of the gate and shipped on early builds of Windows 10 Mobile. By contrast, the iOS bridge called Islandwood is an Objective C compiler combined with compatibility libraries, more work for the developer but likely to achieve better results if done with care.

Source: Microsoft stops working on 'Windows Bridge for Android'