Objective-C and Android [closed]

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Closed 5 years ago.

I've just finished a relatively large project for the Android, and it's left a bitter taste in my mouth with the knowledge that it will never run on one of the most ubiquitous handsets this side of the solar system (the one by that fruity little club).

So, for my next project, I want to write it in a way that makes most of the components easily transportable between the iPhone and Android platforms. The way I'm thinking of doing this is by coding most of it in Objective-C, and then adding the platform-specific parts in more Objective-C and Java respectively. On the Android side, this will require using the the NDK.

My knowledge of C is good, but my knowledge of Objective-C is close to zero, and I have no desire to learn C++. How sane is the approach above, and is there a better one? Is there any way I can code in Java and still reach the un-hacked iPhone market? And how likely is it that the people I know (iPhone users) will have an Android phone by next year?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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 3

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

Answer 4

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 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 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.