Objective-C and Android [closed]

Answer 1

Here is a talk from facebook's mobile @ scale conference where two teams (dropbox and orchestra) used similar approaches. Dropbox used C++ to create libdropbox and Orchestra (mailbox) used Objective-c to create libmailbox.

Again, they wrote their front ends in the platform native language and used their cross platform libs for core logic and data.

Key benefits I took away: Mailbox went from ios to android in 5 weeks because it was just building UI code. Dropbox can beta test changes to core functionality that are in the shared library with Android beta deployments were it's easier to do massive deploys at scale for beta builds.

Answer 2

XMLVM is a project which is capable of translating (some) Android applications to the iPhone. For more infromation, visit http://xmlvm.org/android/

Answer 3

Others have said basically this, but I'd like to make it more explicit. Your best bet is probably to write:

1. Cross-platform data models & core logic, using:
   • bits of GNUstep (Obj-C), or
   • CF-Lite (C), or
   • Whatever you'd like, as long as it's cross-platform :P
2. iPhone-only interface code, using Cocoa Touch (Obj-C)
3. Android-only interface code, however they do it for the Android.

That's as close as you can get; any attempt to write cross-platform interface code will undoubtedly result in a mediocre app on both platforms. But making all the rest of your code portable and just wrapping a device-specific interface around it is done all the time and has been worked great for some iPhone developers.

Answer 4

I haven't tried this myself or finished watching the talk yet, but there is a Google Tech Talk on Developing iPhone Applications using Java up on YouTube that looks pretty promising.

Answer 5

I'm not sure about Android but with the iPhone you can essentially write straight C as long as you wrap it up in Objective-C classes.

Answer 6

I realize this may be a tad late, but it seems the industry is going in the direction of web apps these days to achieve app portability. That is, embedding a web-browser in your "skeleton native app", and writing javascript, css and html for Android, iOS and the other major smartphone platforms.

There are tools that help you with this. You might want to check out PhoneGap and Sencha Touch, but there are many more. Note that this approach may not be ideal for real-time/animation-intensive apps.