They abandoned the android port version before the ios port version, reportedly because the android version took 4x as many developers and any app worth emulating on wp would have both an ios and android version, so doing both was wasted work.

I did try out the windows phone emulation though, and was pretty impressed wrt speed. Video and camera wasn't working yet, but they had an intelligent strategy to stub and reimpment play services and billing.

Amusingly, I had to buy a $50 wp on ebay, because the one microsoft gave me when they flew a bunch of mobile devs to redmond to ask what tools we wanted, the one they gave us was not one of the two models that supported the beta. I'm only salty because, like wp itself, it was never officially killed, and we just had to figure it out when the program stopped updating.

Project Astoria, the Android bridge, also known as the Windows Subsystem for Linux was repurposed for Developer tools/environments (the Ubuntu/OpenSUSE/Fedora on Windows tools we can use now) when the Windows mobile community mostly agreed, based on market experience of BlackBerry 10, that just running Android apps as-is without forcing the developers to port them, and without the availability of Google Play Services, could be a death sentence for the platform. (If Windows 10 is just a bad Android, why not get a real Android?)

The project to port iOS apps to WP was called Project Islandwood. Unfortunately, no iOS developers wanted to waste their time porting their apps to a platform that had no users. So it was a bridge to nowhere.

That's not true. At the time, we gave a serious thought of supporting the platform. A quick inspection of Islandwood, however, was enough to convince us otherwise—be it the frameworks that were missing, hilariously bad implementations of those that were there, dubious choices of the ObjC runtime, the fact that only handful of people from Microsoft actually worked on it, etc. It was an immensely embarrassing project, to be honest. Providing a clean–room implementation of such a mature ecosystem is no small task, of course, but what Microsoft presented was just embarrassing.

King has been using Islandwood to port all their iOS coin-eating games to Windows. (It's part of why even when running on a Windows 10 Desktop PC the games lovingly stick to a strange iOS portrait resolution, because while they can be bothered to port them they aren't worried about making them all that great. ;)

We wouldn't have that default "install me" tile for Candy Crush Saga in Windows 10 if it weren't for Islandwood. :P

Hah. Makes sense.

I think they iced Astoria, like many of the good ideas. They seem to enjoy chaining restarts and broken promises/ideas.