While Microsoft may have put the brakes on its Android-to-Windows 10 app bridge tools known as "Project Astoria", it continues to develop those same kinds of tools for iOS, web-based and Win32 apps. The company posted a brief status update on all three of those bridge tools.
Microsoft stated:
- 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.
Microsoft added that they are adding more APIs to these bridges:
"The philosophy behind the Bridges has always been to make it as easy as possible for you to bring existing code to Windows, and our investments in the iOS Bridge will make this straightforward. We initially focused on API coverage for game developers, but we are expanding our API coverage for all app types by adding support for additional frameworks, etc. We're aiming for significant development cost savings for the majority of 'typical' apps – keep an eye on the project on GitHub, and of course we welcome direct contributions, helping us all out!
Source: Microsoft
