Microsoft announces that the "Astoria" Android app porting project has been officially abandoned

After months of speculation, Microsoft has finally officially announced the death of the Astoria app porting project. At last year's developer conference (Build 2015), Microsoft announced four porting projects, namely - 1) Project Islandwood, which allows developers to port the Objective-C code of iOS applications to Windows Universal Platform (UWP) applications; 2) Project Centennial, which is for porting Win32 applications; 3) Project Westminster, which is for porting Web applications; and 4) Project Astoria, which is for porting Android applications.

Then, something strange happened. When Microsoft released Windows 10 Mobile 10549, it was missing the Android subsystem from the previous compilation. Suddenly, the entire forum was silent, and people speculated that Project Astoria was about to be declared dead.

Although Microsoft is still promoting the iOS bridge (Project Islandwood), it has not commented on Astoria. The two bridge projects have similar ideas, but work in completely different ways.

Project Islandwood allows developers to easily compile existing Objective-C code into a UWP app with minimal changes, while Astoria can handle Android APKs in a similar way.

When Microsoft brought the Android subsystem to Windows 10 Mobile, users quickly found themselves able to download and install an APK file on supported Windows Phone devices.

Here is Microsoft's official statement on abandoning Project Astoria:

We announced Windows Bridge for Android (Project "Astoria") together last year, and some of you have been asking about the status of that project.

We received a lot of feedback about the two bridge technology projects that were not successful in porting code from their mobile operating systems to Windows, and how choosing between them could be confusing.

We considered this feedback carefully and decided that the manager should be placed on Windows Bridge for iOS, making it the single Bridge option for porting to Windows 10 devices (including Xbox and PC).

For developers who have spent a lot of time on Android Bridge, we strongly recommend you to take a look at iOS Bridge and Xamarin, two great solutions.

As we mentioned before, Microsoft did acquire Xamarin for an undisclosed amount. Xamarin allows developers to create a common code based on C# and create Android, iOS, and Windows apps.

As for the other three transplant projects outside of Astoria—Project Islandwood, Westminster, and Centennial—they are all still alive and well.