A few months back we broke the leak of the Project Astoria’s Tool, which allowed to port any Android app to Windows 10, and also showcased it through a demo. It’s one of the bridges Microsoft was working on to get apps on Windows 10 Platform without developers putting extra effort. There are similar bridges for iOS, Web, and WIN32.

Today, Microsoft has officially cancelled Project Astoria.

This announcement comes co-incidentally post Xamarian Acquisition announcement, and Microsoft shares that they had a strong feedback that since most developers had their app on both iOS, and Android, it was confusing for them. Microsoft decided to go ahead with iOS bridge tool.

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.

The first signal of death of Project Astoria came only recently, when news broke out that the beta testers have all gone silent, and its mostly the security that is causing a concern with the project.

Microsoft has also shared more details on other bridges, and its progress.

The Web Bridge (Hosted Web Apps) helps bring HTML and JavaScript web-based apps to the Windows Store and takes advantage of the rich capabilities of the Windows platform, such as Live Tiles, Cortana integration, in-app purchase capabilities and more. This shipped as part of the standard Windows 10 SDK in July and we’ve already seen adoption from companies such as Shazam and Yahoo.
Project “Centennial” helps bring existing Win32 and .NET-based apps to the Windows Store and is in testing with a set of developers now. We’ll have an early iteration of the tools soon, and then we’ll expand the program and support a broader range of developers.

The Windows Bridge for iOS (project “Islandwood”), enables developers to bring Objective-C iOS apps to the Windows Store, was released to GitHub as an open source project in August and we’ve been releasing updates to it frequently. Just last week, we released an update which included the first ARM32 preview compiler drop.