The End of Microsoft’s Android Fever Dream (Premium)

In the heady early days of Windows 10, Terry Myerson's team did what they could to reverse the decades-long decline in native Windows app development. It would prove to be a futile, losing effort that first focused on righting the wrongs of the mobile app platform his predecessor had introduced in Windows 8. But the next step was trying to convince developers to bring their codebases from other platforms—Android, iOS, Win32/Windows desktop, and the web—via a series of so-called bridges, each of which confusingly worked quite differently.

The Android bridge, code-named Astoria, was perhaps the most interesting because it included a way to run Android apps directly in Windows 10 without requiring the developer to port their code. This effort was killed by Microsoft because—get this—it was too good, and Myerson's team knew that it would undermine their new native app platform, which had been renamed to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

In the wake of this internal reshuffling, Microsoft acquired Xamarin to gain access to its Xamarin Forms solution, which allowed developers to write apps for Windows, Android, and iOS using a single codebase. Xamarin Forms eventually morphed into .NET MAUI, and it remains Microsoft's only native cross-platform client app solution for developers. But by the time that happened, Myerson was long gone, the bridges were all dead, and Microsoft had given up trying to push UWP on developers. It migrated unique UWP capabilities to the desktop as "Project Reunion," later renamed to the Windows App SDK, but developers have been ignoring it ever since, just as they did with UWP and its predecessors. As noted previously, these efforts were all futile: In an era defined by web and mobile apps, new native Windows app development hasn't been a viable option for developers for decades.

Finally facing this reality, Microsoft and the Windows team recalibrated: Since native Windows app development no longer mattered, developers were free to use other operating systems and often did. Those who focused on iPhone and iPad apps would naturally choose a Mac, since that was the only truly viable option (cross-platform solutions like Flutter, MAUI, and React Native notwithstanding). And most other developers chose Linux. It is perhaps ironic that Microsoft's Visual Studio Code contributed to this shift by being available across platforms.

But there was a new goal to make Windows the most desirable platform for developers. This effort is ongoing today, and it reached the heights of absurdity when Microsoft made Dev Home, a developer dashboard of sorts, part of the base installation of Windows 11 along with related features like Dev Drive. But before we got to that extreme, Microsoft introduced, in turn, its Windows Subsystem for Linux to help keep developers who might have otherwise switched to that open source platform in Windows, and then the related Windows Subsystem for Android for Windows 11. Though there was...