Microsoft shut downs Project Astoria

Microsoft is shutting down Project Astoria, a set of bridge tools that allowed Android developers to bring their apps to Windows. The Project Astoria had been struggling for quite some time, and was also put on hold.

The Project Astoria was announced at Microsoft's 2015 Build conference alongside Project Islanwood (porting iOS apps to Windows), Project Centennial (used to port existing Win32 and .NET apps to universal Windows 10 app) and  Project Westminster (used for porting web apps). Microsoft says that it's still proceeding with the other three projects, as they will be enough resources for developers to port their apps to Windows 10 platform.

The news comes a day after Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin, a cross-platformed application development company that creates software tools for making mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows platforms.Xarmain's software tools allows developers to write code in C# and have it run as native code on the Android, iOS, Windows mobile platforms.

Microsoft also says that it will offer further details on the Bridges, Xamarin and Universal Windows Platform at it Build Developer Conference that will take place on March 30 - April 1.

Here's Microsoft's official statement: "We also announced the Windows Bridge for Android (project “Astoria”) at Build last year, and some of you have asked about its status. 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" 

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