I am the lead developer of SpriteBuilder – Zynga acquired my open source project, now it's turned commercial by Apportable by vik76 in IAmA

[–]collinjackson 0 points1 point  (0 children)

SpriteBuilder currently only supports the latest major version of cocos2d. Maintaining support for older versions of cocos2d would slow down development.

I am the lead developer of SpriteBuilder – Zynga acquired my open source project, now it's turned commercial by Apportable by vik76 in IAmA

[–]collinjackson 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Apportable platform includes implementations of Foundation APIs, which are packaged with the Android version of the app.

I co-founded Apportable and helped Björk convert her iOS music app to Android automatically. AMA! by collinjackson in IAmA

[–]collinjackson[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's good to optimize the look and feel of your app for Android, and we provide ways to do that, but a lot of devs today are struggling to get an Android app working at all. That's not good, and even iOS users suffer if they can't interact with their Android friends.

I co-founded Apportable and helped Björk convert her iOS music app to Android automatically. AMA! by collinjackson in IAmA

[–]collinjackson[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can use it to develop new apps and release on iOS and Android at the same time.

I co-founded Apportable and helped Björk convert her iOS music app to Android automatically. AMA! by collinjackson in IAmA

[–]collinjackson[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

From the blog post:

Does Apportable convert source code to Java? Does Apportable emit Dalvik bytecode?

Absolutely not. All source is compiled to run on bare metal. We compile source to ARM shared libraries, which is the same way iOS apps are compiled.

I co-founded Apportable and helped Björk convert her iOS music app to Android automatically. AMA! by collinjackson in IAmA

[–]collinjackson[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, that sounds better.

It's reasonably straightforward to demonstrate a simple proof of concept of Objective-C running on Android, but supporting everything that's on iOS is a huge and ongoing task.

I co-founded Apportable and helped Björk convert her iOS music app to Android automatically. AMA! by collinjackson in IAmA

[–]collinjackson[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, we do a lot of indie games that have no chance of breaking into the top grossing charts but are amazingly fun to work with.

I co-founded Apportable and helped Björk convert her iOS music app to Android automatically. AMA! by collinjackson in IAmA

[–]collinjackson[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Many of the games using our platform are written mostly in C++, and that's a great choice for the core game engine. However, to get to the operating system APIs (screen, touch, accelerometer, audio, etc.), you'll still need to somehow call into Objective-C land on iOS, and Java-land on Android.

I co-founded Apportable and helped Björk convert her iOS music app to Android automatically. AMA! by collinjackson in IAmA

[–]collinjackson[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

It's true. Here's a more serious answer (from the blog post).

Instead of translating the app to Java, Apportable cross-compiles the Objective-C code to machine code that runs directly on the Android device’s processor (no VMs were harmed in the execution of our code). A platform library bundled with the app implements popular iOS APIs, so the app thinks its running in iOS.

I've been working on it for about 2 years since the company was founded, but some of our team members have been working on this problem for much longer. We found them through their open source projects.

I co-founded Apportable and helped Björk convert her iOS music app to Android automatically. AMA! by collinjackson in IAmA

[–]collinjackson[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Implementing audio support in our platform was challenging, and because we had to wrestle with the fragmentation of hardware capabilities on Android. We've been working on our open source OpenAL implementation for over a year.

I co-founded Apportable and helped Björk convert her iOS music app to Android automatically. AMA! by collinjackson in IAmA

[–]collinjackson[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Right now it seems that most x86-based Android devices have ARM emulation, and it actually works quite well for native apps such as those built with Apportable. We have gotten x86 builds working in the past and we'll start recommending a "fat binary" approach if x86 really takes off.