What is the most efficient way to port an iPhone app to Android? I know Apple doesn't like 3rd-party, non-Objective C platforms generating code for their platform ... but is there something out there that can take an iPhone app and convert it to Android friendly code?
If not, how have folks out there been creating Android versions of their existing iPhone apps?
Thanks
There's nothing of the sort to port your app. You can use 3rd party tools to create apps that work in both. That's what Titanium and PhoneGap were aiming at. With the new changes to the SDK Agreement, those look like they're not really "legal" or at least violate the agreement.
As for your other question, yes, people do create 2 separate apps. One for Android and one for iPhone. That's the way I currently do it and seems as if Facebook and others do the same.
There are few alternatives to port an app from one platform to other. like Rhodes Mobile, Titanium and PhoneGap. In fact they did a good job and tried very well to remove fragmentation in smart phone app development.
But according to Apple's SDK Agreement version 4.0, section 3.3.1
app must be developed in C/C++/JAVA script.
At this stage convincing way is to write it separately.
What we need to be talking about is now how to convert one to the other.
What every developer out there should be asking is there a framework based on already known language that can be used to write phone apps. (irrespective of platform).
We need a simple and easy to learn IDE and people to develop compilers that can then compile the code to different environments:
a) Android b) iPhone OS c) Windows Mobile 7 d) Symbian...
Obviously you are going to have certain functionalities / libraries that will work on one and not the other.
But they are all mobile computing environments.
They have things in common - we need to consolidate them. We need to abstract the platform that the app will finally run on.
Hope it moves in this direction.
Yeah, people don't usually love the answer that we have for this one at Appiction. It seems like it should be easy since they are so similar, but they are completely different operating systems with different ways of being used. Sometimes a company will be able to cut a deal with you since the art has already be developed and the basic wireframes have been conceived. At Appiction we created a video to answer this exact question for our clients: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-fdRw1WNYI