Following Xamarin acquisition, Microsoft will kill its RoboVM service in April 2017

Microsoft will stop operating the RoboVM service for turning Java-based applications into native mobile apps for iOS and Android. After April 30, 2017, developers’ subscriptions to the service will not work.

The news comes two months after Microsoft announced that it had bought Xamarin, a startup whose software converts C# code into mobile app code. Xamarin itself said it had bought RoboVM in October.

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“Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working with the teams at Xamarin and Microsoft to assess the technology and business conditions of RoboVM to determine the path forward for the products,” RoboVM cofounder and CEO Henric Müller wrote yesterday on the RoboVM blog. “After looking at the complete landscape for mobile development with Java, the decision has been made to wind down development of RoboVM.”

This is a bit startling, given that it really hasn’t been that long since RoboVM was feeling optimistic about how much impact it would gain from being acquired by Xamarin.

“Xamarin’s market-leading position in enterprise mobility means that we will be able to scale our reach and enable mobile success for millions of developers,” Müller was quoted as saying in the statement on Xamarin’s purchase of RoboVM.

Microsoft’s decision to end RoboVM is also surprising because Microsoft has been doing more and more to support cross-platform app development, with Xamarin serving as one example.

Fortunately for Java enterprise developers, there are a number of alternatives, although Müller specifically called out the open-source libGDX library. RoboVM itself suspended open-source development last year.