Microsoft cancels effort to run Android software on Windows Mobile, focuses on iOS compatibility

Last May, Microsoft announced that it had created “bridges” designed to allow developers to more easily port iOS and Android applications to the Windows Phone platform. 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. Now, Astoria has been formally confirmed dead, though the company’s reasoning is a little odd.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft states:
We received a lot of feedback that having two Bridge technologies to bring code from mobile operating systems to Windows was unnecessary, and the choice between them could be confusing. We have carefully considered this feedback and decided that we would focus our efforts on the Windows Bridge for iOS and make it the single Bridge option for bringing mobile code to all Windows 10 devices, including Xbox and PCs. For those developers who spent time investigating the Android Bridge, we strongly encourage you to take a look at the iOS Bridge and Xamarin as great solutions.

There was a major difference between Islandwood and Astoria. Islandwood (the iOS bridge) is a tool chain that provides an Objective-C development environment in Visual Studio and supports iOS APIs. Astoria was a full-on emulator that theoretically allowed Android applications to “just work” on Windows Mobile, with minimal modification required. iOS compatibility, in other words, requires a recompile — Android compatibility didn’t.

Xamarin is designed to let developers share code between multiple platforms, but requires developers to use C#. It’s clearly not a drop-in replacement for the emulation Microsoft was promising.

In theory, Astoria could have solved Microsoft’s software problem in a stroke — but there were always concerns that this would prove the operating system’s undoing. The advantage of flawless compatibility with a much larger operating system is that you can take advantage of the software ecosystem created for millions of devices. The disadvantage is that you kill any real incentive for developers to create software on your platform. Why bother building Windows apps, after all, if you can just run the Android versions? You also run the risk that Android apps will use UI elements that don’t play well with Microsoft standards, and that certain physical differences (the presence or absence of physical buttons, for example) will make it difficult for end users to navigate a program.

As Technica theorizes that we may yet see some of Astoria’s DNA in other projects at Microsoft, especially those that involve cross-compatibility with the Linux platform. Those of you hoping for a seamless crossover between Android and Windows Mobile, unfortunately, are going to be out of luck. It’s not clear if Microsoft can reverse the decline of Windows Mobile at all, though some solutions, like HP’s recent Elite X3, could drive some business engagements.