“Users no longer need to be locked into one platform. Being able to write an app once and run it anywhere has been a long-sought-after goal and a very hard problem to solve.”<p>This is naive, stupid, or both. There never was a technical cause of lock in (as indeed the Apportable people are not alone in demonstrating), it's purely an artificial business construct with the surmountable technical hurdles being very convenient.<p>It's well within Apple's capabilities to launch the media consumption parts of iTunes on Android, like on Windows PCs, but it should be kind of telling that they don't.<p>One of the lessons of my career so far is never underestimate the ability of people to assume that problems are primarily technical in nature when actually the real problem is something else. Technical excuses can often be used for after the fact justification of management decisions.
<i>... we reused existing iOS frameworks and libraries in our approach, avoiding the difficult and complex reimplementation effort of Wine.</i><p>Cool, but it's against Apple's EULA to run the iOS binaries on non-Apple hardware, so unfortunately this project suffers from the same problem as emulators that require you to acquire the original firmware somehow.
Can Apple can stop the research team releasing the source code?<p>The research project was partly funded by NSF grants, so does that mean the public have the right to see all work related to the project?<p>I ask because the lead researcher, Jeremy Andrus, is now employed by Apple and wrote this on the YouTube video:<p><i>"I have started a job with Apple, and will not be continuing work on this project.
The team at Columbia will probably be doing some follow up work, but I won't be involved from here on out."</i><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaple0Ec1Dg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaple0Ec1Dg</a><p><a href="http://systems.cs.columbia.edu/files/wpid-asplos2014-cider.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://systems.cs.columbia.edu/files/wpid-asplos2014-cider.p...</a>
Here's a comment from this project's creator on the demo video (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaple0Ec1Dg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaple0Ec1Dg</a>):<p><i>I have started a job with Apple, and will not be continuing work on this project. The team at Columbia will probably be doing some follow up work, but I won't be involved from here on out.</i><p>So basically Apple has tried to kill or at least slow down the release of this to the public (he's obviously talented, I'm just saying that killing progress on this project likely factored somewhere into the hiring decision).
> "a new system that can run iOS apps on an Android device for the first time"<p>We at Apportable (YC W2011) have been doing that for 3 + years in a much for commercially viable way. We strive for source compatibility and are not building an emulator that requires taking libraries from an iOS device.
<i>there are all kinds of cool iOS apps that they cannot run, like iTunes and iMessage</i><p>Really? iTunes is cool? I'm yet to see someone who likes it, including my friends who are big time iOS fans.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaple0Ec1Dg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaple0Ec1Dg</a><p>Besides the legal obstacles to making this commerically viable, there are technical ones too:<p><i>Unfortunately this technology is quite a bit more complicated than a simple .apk download - it involves system-wide changes including a modified Linux kernel.</i>
There was a similar project a couple of years ago, where someone got iOS apps running on a BlackBerry Playbook: <a href="http://crackberry.com/developer-gets-ios-apps-running-blackberry-real" rel="nofollow">http://crackberry.com/developer-gets-ios-apps-running-blackb...</a><p>At the time, I said that RIMM/BlackBerry should do whatever they could to acquire this technology, enhance it, and bundle it with BB10. Combined with BB10's already-demonstrated capability to run Android apps, it could have meant "the best of all possible worlds" for BB owners...the ability to run apps from the two most popular competing platforms, on a platform that's <i>much</i> more secure and higher-performing.
For a minute I thought this was announcing that Cider[1] now supports iOS -> Android (Cider is currently existing tech used for porting Windows games to OS X, based on Cedega/Wine).<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.transgaming.com/cider" rel="nofollow">https://www.transgaming.com/cider</a>
Apps on iOS are encrypted and they say they use some modified script from a jailbreak to decrypt the apps. So for this to work, they need a jailbroken device to decrypt the apps first. So not future proof as well.
This is pretty cool. There's a demo of it running on a Nexus 7[0].
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[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaple0Ec1Dg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaple0Ec1Dg</a>
So what are the chances that this will get released in some sort of end-user friendly format?
If the original developers don't do it will others be able to apply the ideas now that they are proven to work?
Seems way more commercially focused than is reasonable given that it is NSF funded, especially given the fact that there is nothing technically insurmountable that locks users into one eco-system vs the other.
There were a couple of attempts at similar stuff before, I was working on a similar thing (called Magenta) but I kind of lost motivation a long time ago.
Awesome! We, at MyAppConverter are going beyond iOS to Android by also tackling the other mobile dev platforms. Besides, no runtime, no SDK to download. Our solution is based on Semantic Driven Code Transformation and Model Driven Engineering. We are currently doing private beta and will be coming out soon. Cheers.