Why isn’t the Windows Store filled with bridged iOS apps?

Reddit users are debating why there aren’t any iOS apps popping up in the Windows Store. Microsoft has promised to bridge the Windows Store app gap with iOS apps for some time now. Project Astoria was supposed to be the bridge to bring Android apps to Windows 10 but was later abandoned. Microsoft even released a tool to make it easier (presumably) to bridge iOS to Windows 10 with Project Islandwood.

But the apps aren’t flowing into the Windows Store, and the discussion over on Reddit brings up a number of possibilities as to why. Reddit user Aditya1311 points out some issues with Project Islandwood:

“Any or all of the following:

1. Islandwood does not support Swift, only ObjC. iOS apps are rapidly transitioning and almost all new development is in Swift
2. The bridge only supports apps using iOS 7 APIs as of now. This is years out of date.
3. Even assuming 1 & 2 above are not an issue, porting apps even with such a bridge is not a zero-effort process.”

Another Reddit user, tonyunreal, details his frustration with Project Islandwood:

“For me the deal breaker is that microsoft takes absolute zero effort to make islandwood behave exactly like an iOS device.

I know it’s supposed to be a compatibility layer for windows development instead of an emulator, but with this approach, even if islandwood is fully api compatible with the iOS one day, I’m 100% certain that my same piece of code will look or run differently between iOS and Windows. Barely thinking of the effort to make existing app code to run on windows for me is unacceptable, not to mention the need of sugar coating all the UI solely for islandwood.

Until Microsoft take it seriously and implement an actually working UIKit simulation, plus all the needed UNIX calls for daily iOS programming, I see islandwood as nothing but a gimmick.”

Why do you think there aren’t any bridged iOS apps in the Windows Store? Let us know in the comments.