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

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 2

Step back and think about what in the end you will logically be able to share.

The UI models are fairly different, the components are different. In the end what you might be able to share is data object classes, possibly some algorithms. It's not even like you could realistically end up sharing network code as in the old days because you aren't directly using sockets, you are using HTTP libraries.

So will all of the effort you are putting into this really find a payoff in the end? It seems to me the end result will be a brittle mess that is hard to update, and is mediocre on both platforms instead of being great on either.

Why are you writing applications? To make life easier for you, or your users?

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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 5

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 6

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.