Live data from Hacker News

Cider Project: Run iOS apps on Android

engineering.columbia.edu

71–80 of 108 posts

Re: Cider Project: Run iOS apps on Android

#72
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that was definitely one of my motivations for joining a large company.

I'm not trying to be argumentative here, but does that honestly come through? I routinely turn down offers from the big players because I imagine once I'm in, it's going to be like the movie Brazil. I've worked for three large companies as a non-contractor - and I mean maybe I just didn't have the right title but I found the following (in all three): * I was prohibited from working on broken things that I was capable…

i can't speak for all big companies, but i'm happy at google, and a large part of that is that everyone i work with cares about doing things the right way, and is willing to budget the time to do so. for another datapoint, my girlfriend works at salesforce, and she is not just supported but encouraged to work on innovative projects and big new problems.

when i was working at startups one of my largest sources of stress was having to constantly rush shoddy products out of the door because people were obsessed with beating some real or hypothetical competitor to market, never mind that any clients we did get to install our products either gave up early or tied us up with loads of support issues that we again had to fix on a quick-release, ad-hoc basis rather than systematically and correctly.

incidentally my resume says "phd dropout", so if the lack of a big-name university on your phd makes you disinclined to apply to places like google or salesforce, you should at least reconsider. in my experience these companies care a lot less about that sort of branding than they possibly did in the past.

Re: Cider Project: Run iOS apps on Android

#73
post #8

> "a new system that can run iOS apps on an Android device for the first time" We at Apportable (YC W2011) have been doing that for 3 + years in a much for commercially viable way. We strive for source compatibility and are not building an emulator that requires taking libraries from an iOS device.

In general Apportable sounds great. But in reality - we see little results, relatively. Lots of IOS only apps, still. None of the big guys, who would surely be interested in offering devices/app-stores with full access to ios apps have bought you.

So i wonder: why is that gap between the marketing and reality ? and maybe an emulator will close that gap ?

Re: Cider Project: Run iOS apps on Android

#74

“Users no longer need to be locked into one platform. Being able to write an app once and run it anywhere has been a long-sought-after goal and a very hard problem to solve.” This is naive, stupid, or both. There never was a technical cause of lock in (as indeed the Apportable people are not alone in demonstrating), it's purely an artificial business construct with the surmountable technical hurdles being very conven…

> One of the lessons of my career so far is never underestimate the ability of people to assume that problems are primarily technical in nature when actually the real problem is something else.

Amen. When I'm feeling trollish around my tech friends, I'll insist that mobile, not fiber, is the future of the internet, or that mailing DVDs is better than streaming. The former because the OTA market allows new entrants, easier competition. The latter because licensing costs are a red queen problem, and make building a full catalog impossible.

Those are mostly argument starters, but really each just based on getting people to admit one idea: technology isn't the final arbiter of efficiency/inefficiency. Legal and economic considerations are sometimes the trump suit.

Re: Cider Project: Run iOS apps on Android

#75
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaple0Ec1Dg

Besides the legal obstacles to making this commerically viable, there are technical ones too:

Unfortunately this technology is quite a bit more complicated than a simple .apk download - it involves system-wide changes including a modified Linux kernel.

Re: Cider Project: Run iOS apps on Android

#76
post #13

Awesome! We, at MyAppConverter are going beyond iOS to Android by also tackling the other mobile dev platforms. Besides, no runtime, no SDK to download. Our solution is based on Semantic Driven Code Transformation and Model Driven Engineering. We are currently doing private beta and will be coming out soon. Cheers.

awesome, good luck ;)

Re: Cider Project: Run iOS apps on Android

#77
post #13

Awesome! We, at MyAppConverter are going beyond iOS to Android by also tackling the other mobile dev platforms. Besides, no runtime, no SDK to download. Our solution is based on Semantic Driven Code Transformation and Model Driven Engineering. We are currently doing private beta and will be coming out soon. Cheers.

Big up to myappconverter, There is documentation for your app

Re: Cider Project: Run iOS apps on Android

#78
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The user copies across iOS app binary and system libraries and it's done." So, the user gets to violate the Apple copyrights. sigh

I'll violate Apple copyrights until the day I die. Copyright is protectionist, monopolist bullshit, and it gets in the way of empowering users--and "empowering users" is the only ethical purpose of technological development. Anything else will merely work to reinforce existing imbalanced power structures. Additionally, copyright doesn't disallow you from copying a file from one device you own to another. Copyright is…

I'm curious: Would you have the same stance if you released some (non-free) software or a non-free hardware product and it was really successful? Would you want people to ignore the copyright then? Would you be happy for it to show up entirely cloned in the far East?

People seem to have this disgust of Copyright / paying for music / paying for films / paying for software and justify it with vague arguments about "fat cats" and "sticking it to the man" but then would obviously object to people taking their own stuff....

Re: Cider Project: Run iOS apps on Android

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always read it as "Hacker" in the traditional sense of the term, not the alarmist media "OMG!!H4qq0r" sense of the word. Hacking used to simply mean programming.

"Hacking used to simply mean programming" Did it though? I thought it referred to finding creative solutions to problems that often incorporated programming. Was anyone really considered to be hacking if they were writing tic tac toe in Basic?

Hacking used to mean anyone using a keyboard.

Re: Cider Project: Run iOS apps on Android

#80
post #5

... we reused existing iOS frameworks and libraries in our approach, avoiding the difficult and complex reimplementation effort of Wine. Cool, but it's against Apple's EULA to run the iOS binaries on non-Apple hardware, so unfortunately this project suffers from the same problem as emulators that require you to acquire the original firmware somehow.

> but it's against Apple's EULA This is Hacker News, right?

Let it go man, the days of hacker meaning anything other than "dude that uses a computer" are dead. I know what you mean, I remember the "hacker" ethos that was willing to throw middle fingers in the air EULA, but this crowd doesn't even seem aware of the difference between that crowd as "hackers" and people popping boxes as "hackers." Or the handful of other types of people covered by the always-vague "hacker". The internet community you're looking for is no longer a sizable portion of the people into tech, personalities expanded as as the field grew. And you're sure not going to find what you're talking about in a corner where the people here primarily for money congregate.

To summarize, the internet pissing match between if it meant "cracker" or something more akin to "respected technologist" was won by a late entrant: "using the cachet a label the former two groups built to sell a job to someone that is neither."

Or, to summarize the summary: The moment Paul Graham's writing told me I was a hacker, I knew I irrevocably wasn't.

Post reply on HN