During Build 2015, Microsoft announced Project Astoria which is going to help developers easily port or even the reuse of Android code to bring applications to Windows. A demo was all that we have seen so far but it seems that Microsoft has hidden an entire Android subsystem in the build 10149 update package.

Out of the roughly 300MB Main OS package, ~100MB is dedicated to a package called “projecta”. It contains a few DLLs and the framework of Android-on-Windows apps. The most interesting part of this is that it also contains an Android file system containing some tools like adbd, the Android Debugger Daemon and both native and Hyper-V drivers.

The Android on Windows subsystem lives under System32 and includes an OpenGLES translator.

If this exists on all our handsets running 10149, is Microsoft secretly adding these new features to unlock them as an update? Would you like to have Project Astoria on your windows phone? Let us know in the comments below.

Thanks Fabio to share your findings.