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

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.