Objective-C and Android [closed]

Answer 1

The Apportable SDK is an Objective-C approach to write once and deploy to both IOS and Android. It will cross-compile a running IOS Xcode project to an Android SDK.

See here for sample apps that run on both platforms in minutes after download.

Answer 2

If you can wait until later this year (exact amount of time unknown), Adobe will have AIR for Android and a compiler to iPhone. Thus you can write an app in AIR for the Android and use most of the same code to compile to the iPhone.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/

Even if you can't wait see: http://www.insideria.com/2008/12/actionscript-to-cocoa---protot.html where it explains the similarities between ActionScript and Cocoa.

Also check out: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/ for the AIR version capable of using the touch screen.

So you can soon write once and deploy to Android and iPhone using ActionScript 3.

Answer 3

My guess, which has no experience to back it up, is that you probably could write Obj-C with Google's NDK somehow, given that GCC exists for ARM, is open source, has an Obj-C compiler and a basic Obj-C runtime (which if it doesn't already probably could be hacked up to work on a new architecture), etc.

That might also be a lot of work for questionable benefit.

And of course "Obj-C" (without the NS classes) means something very different than "Cocoa", which is what most people really mean when they say "Obj-C". You might be able to re-use some of GNUstep for some that, but... Honestly, I doubt it. Sounds again like a lot of work.

So, yes, I think it is possible. It's also a lot of work and I don't think it's worth it.

Given what you've said, if I were attempting this, I would be tempted to write as much of your core logic as possible in C, then wrap it with two separate GUIs for each platform.

Answer 4

Coming at this from a different angle... I know that you said you wanted to try and stick with Java, but if you know C# then you could go with the MonoTouch framework for the iPhone. Mono is essentially and open source implementation of the .Net stack. The Mono team is working on bringing Mono to the Android so you could basically write a shared C# library for your business logic and have different Views/Controllers per platform. This would all be in C# of course and it is a bit more expensive, but it does solve the problem of writing everything in different languages.

I believe it is called MonoTouch on the iPhone and MonoDroid on Android.

Answer 5

Objective-C without Cocoa is not so useful and won't bring you much closer to haveing a working iPhone codebase. You'd probably be better off writing your core in C with Core Foundation and using either Java or Objective-C for the platform specific parts. Apple has open sourced a large chunk of Core Foundation as CF-Lite, and it's toll-free bridged with Cocoa on OS X (i.e. you can use many CF classes interchangeably with their Cocoa counterparts).

Answer 6

The Objective-C runtime has not been ported to Android yet. It shouldn't be too much work, but still, without a working knowledge of the language I doubt you'll have an easy time porting it.

What you are trying to do is going to be hard for a generic application, but should be possible for games, if you choose to develop the game in plain C (which is supported by both the Android NDK and the iPhone). You'd have to write up some glue code to pass input events from the Obj-C and Java environments into your C code, but that shouldn't be much of a problem - Objective-C allows you to directly call into your C code and there are plenty of example projects which do exactly this for Android.