Ever since Microsoft announced their Bridge technologies at Build 2015 questions about how they work (and how well) have been asked. The tools let developers port over Android apps (Project Astoria), iOS apps (Project Islandwood), web apps (Project Westminster) and classic Win32 apps (Project Centennial) to Windows 10 including phone.
This morning, the actual tools for Project Astoria have leaked onto the web and users can freely (and illegally) download Android APKs and sideload them to their Windows Phone running Windows 10 Mobile. This follows yesterday’s leak of the documentation for the project.
Project Astoria is fascinating. If you look at the leaked documenation, you’ll see Microsoft is running (parts of) the Android subsystem and Linux kernel in kernel mode. This should be nice for performance, but at the same time, it doesn’t seem like something that’ll be good from a security standpoint.
The leaked documentation also explains that in Project Astoria, all activities belong to a back stack within a single task. In regular Android, activities can belong to different tasks, with their own back stacks. If I’m reading this right (and please, do correct me if I’m wrong – this isn’t exactly my expertise), this should simplify the back button behaviour – and is probably a consequence of Project Astoria only being able to run one process at a time.
Another fun part of Astoria: there’s a WebKit rendering engine in there. Yes, Windows 10 Mobile will have a WebKit rendering engine. Fascinating.
The GPL blues will drowsen your mind, steal your money, and ultimately timewarp Tux up your ass. And Stallman will laugh his usual LSD laugh. “Be free hacker, be free”.
But to those already used to the magic seed of Wozniak, on top of Apples building, it will probably be welcome. Indeed a lot of moderators and article writers seem to only approve if this indeed is so.
Windows Phone – Better Android than Android!
Windows Phone – Better iOS than iOS
Sorry couldn’t resist
However has Blackberry skyrocketed due to its ability to run Android apps?
Until Android and iOS developers are not replaced with WP developers then nothing will change for WP. If WP can run anythin non-WP there is no incentive to invest into WP technologies. Also the non-native apps will make the WP experience really obscure. Side-by-side you have iOS and Android app none of which fit into WP design so it is total nightmare for end users.
Emulation is not the path to success. The UX and consisten experience is, after you get the developers behind your platform. So all that does not seem very healthy for Windows Phone as a platform.
Microsoft better than anyone else should have learned from OS/2.
Windows Phone is a great platform and it is sad to see management doing a Blackberry, OS/2 move just to try to save the platform at any cost.
After learning WP 8.x, I look with disdain to the Android developer experience. Sadly it is the one winning.
History is indeed against Microsoft on this one. Once somebody (Android and IOS) reach critical mass there is no hope.
Well, actually there is one thing and that is to have an extremely long breath and keep true to yourself. Firefox/Chrome eventually took over from IE but that took 5 year of non-development on the MS-side in one of the most active fronts of computing.
Macs are slowly growing while pc’s are slowly shrinking but even after decades they aren’t even at the 10% marker.
Microsoft is doing everyting it can to keep Windows on Mobile relevant but even with all their power, money, talents and userbase it might simply be too late. I would personally much rather see 30/30/30/10 for Android/IOS/Windows/Other than the current 75/20/5 (worldwide) or 50/50 (US)
Looks like it’s more like 60/30/10 in the US, with iOS falling.
http://musically.com/2015/08/06/ios-market-share-growing-europe-us/
Thanks for the stats. It is quite shocking to me to suddenly see 66/31/3 instead of 49/49/2, especially since I keep hearing “Record profits for Apple, Samsung in decline, nobody else makes any money”. Not really “10” for the other platforms though
I wish there was a (free) reference that showed “installed base” (most interesting for me as a developer), “recent sales” (for watching the trend) and “profits” (not useful, just interesting)
Edit: So Android is suddenly twice the size of iOS?” And “Samsung+LG” is > 1.5 times the size of Apple? Either Apple had a major drop, LG is much bigger than expected or Samsung did something major…what happened in the US?
Edited 2015-08-14 08:40 UTC
A thought…
To run Windows Apps on the pure 32 bit OS/2 Warp, required that you buy brand new a (8mb) machine twice as powerful as the then standard (4mb) 32/16-bit-hybrid Windows Machine.
OS/2 had lots of nice things, but performance and the ability running windows app was not one of them…
On the other hand the ability of OS/X to run Windows and it apps, has been a big bonus for OS/X and Apple.
Edited 2015-08-12 13:12 UTC
OS X doesn’t run Windows apps. Intel Macs are basically fancy PCs, so of course they can run Windows via Boot Camp or virtualized via Parallels.
I remember Windows apps running just as fast on OS/2 as Windows on the same dual boot machine. Granted, that was Windows 3.11, but I’m not sure what you’re on about.
Some Android Devs are going to get some bizarre bug reports from users.
They must already be getting those reports from Blackberry users. I run more Android apps on my Blackberry than Blackberry ones.
Of course, I spend much more time in the native apps but outside of the core apps I use there is more Android than anything else.
This is a strange move from MS.
I would have thought, they provide a way to effortless recompile a Android-App into a native Win-App, but this now seems very close to Jollas use of Alien Dalvik or Blackberrys approach.
Market for native Apps on Blackberry and Jolla is dead and providing Android compatibility did not help at all.
I love my Jolla Phone and I only use native apps, but … well its far from being a productive device.
Why should you care to port your App to a platform, when it runs with no or minimal changes on a compatibility layer?
But these Android-apps on Jolla just don’t feel right ….
This isn’t so much about Windows Phone (for all the reasons others are going into) as it is about Windows as a developer platform.
What Microsoft are saying is “You want to develop iOS and Android apps? That’s fine! — Try Windows and Visual Studio so you can do it all on one machine and one IDE”
Developers want to target the most ubiquitous platform available, but by running Android on Windows, Microsoft themselves have stated that’s Android. And users want a reliable platform on which to run their apps, but an additional layer of emulation only makes a platform less reliable. So why would developers write Windows apps for a platform with a smaller market share, or users pick a Windows Phone just to run their existing Android apps less reliably?
What is the Windows Phone Platform offering users and developers in addition to that? Performance, Security, Reliability, Support, Portability? Because while I’m happy I don’t have to give up anything in moving to Windows, I still need an actual reason to do so.