iOS Apps and Games Can Run on Android

Soon, we will be able to port iOS flagship apps and games to our Android devices, which would effectively eliminate the Google vs Apple warfare in terms of OS-exclusive games and apps. Six students of Columbia University have come up with a technology that would enable Android devices run iOS apps and games. The architecture was code-named Cider.

Instead of deploying a virtual drive approach, the young developers found a different approach by making a universal app that runs domestic and foreign un-modified binary code on one device. Thus, Cider can copy the lacking libraries and frameworks, making the iOS app 'think' it runs on Apple XNU kernel environment instead of Android Linux.

The developers showcased a video where they installed Cider on a Nexus 7 and managed to run several iOS apps, namely Yelp and iBooks. Nevertheless, Cider is only a prototype, which is far from being ready for prime time. As of now, the build lacks features that would enable it to access the camera, Bluetooth and GPS functionality, which makes it useless for a large number of iOS apps that users would want to try running on their Android devices.

Let us hope the developers manage to finish the project sometime soon and release it on the market before Apple, or God forbid Google, lay their hands on the promising and quite dangerous endeavor and the entire story ends without having started.

You can find the research project here: Cider: Native Execution of iOS Apps on Android (PDF).

The story was spotted on The Next Web.