Reviving Astoria – Windows's Lost Android

Summary

Are you a die-hard fan of Project Astoria, Microsoft's former solution to bridging the app gap on Windows 10 Mobile? Or are you just tired of your average sluggish, resource-hogging Android emulator? This post, exploring the method to bring Astoria to various unsupported Windows versions, from different platforms like Desktop to higher builds like the Anniversary Update (RS1) and beyond, is just for you. Generated by Microsoft Copilot. Introduction​ Project Astoria, (a.k.a Windows Bridge for Android), was an attempt to allow Android apps to run on early prerelease builds of Windows 10 Mobile. It was available exclusively to Mobile builds and canceled before the public release of Windows version 1511 ("Thresold 2"). The solution features an Android 4.4 environment running on a compatibility layer (lxcore.sys) that translates Linux syscalls issued by the Android runtime to equivalent Windows NT calls. With the help of more glue services, Astoria allowed many Android applications to run alongside with native Windows apps and seamlessly integrate into the environment with little performance penalty, unlike existing solutions which spawns a full virtual machine. While only released for mobile, the design of Astoria theoretically also supports other variants of Windows 10. After its demise, the project had a second life as the Windows Subsystem for Linux, created to run console Linux applications, before being abandoned in favor of a brute-force Hyper-V solution in 2020. Prerequisites​ General Windows power user techniques (e.g. modifying the registry and system files). Using Project Astoria to install APKs on supported Windows 10 Mobile versions. A general guide can be found here. Preparing​ Being a complex component, Astoria involves multiple files and expects the system to have certain features and configurations available. Overview of Components of Project Astoria. Windows 10 Version​ This guide is tested on Windows 10 x86 build 10563. 32-bit Windows 10 variants up to...