Microsoft officially kills Project Astoria tool for porting Android apps to Windows 10


Microsoft has officially confirmed that it is shutting down Project Astoria tool that allowed developers to port their existing Android apps to Windows 10 easily. The company had announced its plans to launch tools for developers to quickly port Android and iOS apps to Windows 10 earlier this April.

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The news about comes only months after it was reported in November that the company has put the Project Astoria on hold indefinitely and maybe even shelved completely. Astoria would have allowed Android apps written in Java to work on Windows 10 with minimal alteration. Just yesterday, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Xamarin which creates software tools for making mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows platforms. It allow mobile developers to write code in C# and have it run as native code on the aforementioned mobile platforms.

Microsoft said in a blog post

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.

Giving further insights on the Windows 10 bridges, Microsoft said that Web Bridge that is used for porting web apps and Project Centennial which is used for porting existing Win32 and .NET apps, will be enough options for developers looking to port their apps to Windows 10 platforms. Microsoft said it will Build offer further details on the Bridges, Xamarin, our Universal Windows Platform at its Build developer conference this year.


Author: Sneha Bokil

Sneha Bokil is a tech enthusiast and is currently using OnePlus 3T but she still treasures her Nokia N70 (M). You can follow her on Twitter @snehabokil and on Google+