A leak reveals what Andromeda, Microsoft’s canceled operating system for the Surface Duo, looked like

The lack of success of Windows Phone was not reason enough for Microsoft to immediately abandon its dreams of the mobile world. Before turning to Android for the Surface Duo, the company was working on Andromeda, an operating system for your dual-screen smartphones.

The project was postponed in 2018 and never picked up again. However, now we have a chance to take a look at what Andromeda was and how Microsoft envisioned the successor to Windows Phone. This is possible thanks to the fact that Windows Central have obtained a preliminary version of the operating system.

Andromeda, the project that never saw the light

As we can see in the video, Andromeda runs on a Lumia 950. This does not mean that the operating system was designed to work on that smartphone, but rather that it was one of the terminals that Microsoft engineers had to work with in the early stages. of the project.

Precisely, it is an early version of the operating system, but that does not mean that it does not show some very interesting features. One of them is the lock screen. Is allowed to take notes directly by placing the pen on the screen and without the need to open any application.

When unlocking the terminal, the possibility of taking notes was not lost, but was enriched with an experience called Journal in which you could add post-its, images, 3D objects and more. Journal ran in the background, so it was always available to the user.

Gesture navigation was also a feature present in Andromeda. When the Home and Cortana buttons disappeared when opening an app, you could swipe left to access the first button and right to access the second. If you swiped down, Control Center appeared.

This last feature was very similar to what we can see in Windows 10 or Windows 11. It had the ability to control brightness, volume, Bluetooth, mobile data, Wi-Fi, Concentration and others. Cortana, meanwhile, acted as notification manager.

Certainly some parts of Andromeda appear unfinished or do not display correctly. Let’s remember that we are dealing with an operating system at an early stage of its development, running on a single-screen device when its destination was the dual-screen ones.

Andromeda wasn’t the only project for dual-screen devices that Microsoft canceled. Those from Redmond were developing Windows 10X, a solution aimed at devices such as the Surface Neo, but it was finally canceled shortly before the launch of Windows 11.

Images | Windows Central