Announced at the company’s Build conference a year ago, Windows Bridge for Android – codenamed Astoria – promised to make it simple for developers to take existing Android applications and port them across to the Windows Store for installation on Windows 10, Windows Mobile 10, and the Xbox console platform. Developers can build apps using C# for all major devices, including iOS, Android and Windows.
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For those few Android-only developers, Microsoft recommends looking into Xamarin – the startup Microsoft bought yesterday for a reported $500 million, which lets developers write a bit of code once and run it anywhere. But now Microsoft is going back and dropping the Android bridge, focusing on just iOS.
Microsoft ultimately wanted to change that problem with Windows 10 for phones with two tools, Windows Bridge for iOS, otherwise known as Islandwood, and Windows Bridge for Android, also known as Astoria. Gallo goes on to say that using Xamarin will make it easy to share common app code across the three mobile platforms – Windows, iOS, and Android – and still deliver fully-native experiences for users of each specific platform. Now in an update on the Windows Blog, the company has officially announced that the project has been given the axe.
It’s an abrupt setback to Microsoft’s effort to juice up its struggling mobile platform by building various “Windows Bridges”.
At present, Microsoft is working out with Visual Studio for developing app tools. The news is not a great shock as the two companies have worked together for some years, while back in 2014 it was rumored that Microsoft was in the “final stages of negotiations” to buy Xamarin.
Why would they kill off their Android Bridge?
However, a number of observers have pointed out that there are likely reasons beyond the Xamarin acquisition that persuaded Microsoft to put an end to Astoria.
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I wonder how Microsoft would feel if someone cancelled Windows apps tools and instead told them to look at the tools for OSX apps instead? But many developers wanted to use C# and Microsoft’s.NET framework on Linux.
