When Stormy first showed me this article on TechCrunch, I was blown aback by the idea of all the quality iOS apps I would have at my disposal. Then I started thinking and the more I thought about it, the more I began to think this might not be a great idea.
Now I want to preface my concerns below, by first saying that this would be a massive achievement technologically speaking. There will need to be a lot going on under the hood beyond just getting the app to display in Android. The security and reverse engineering aspects of this project alone could very well lead to some great breakthroughs for the Android platform.
It’s the emulator portion for easy iOS app ports that I take issue with here.
In my earlier post Apple, Google and an 800 pound Gorilla, I asked why Android is viewed by the public as a second-rate smartphone. This I feel may only exacerbate the situation.
If some of the talented but not so big developers for iOS, (which we desperately need working on Android) feel that this is an excellent way to get their product on the platform without the extra footwork, we may end up with second-rate versions of the app. There is just no way to possibly port these applications running at full speed, the system overhead for emulation alone would likely leave very little resources for anything else needed to make them usable. I can maybe see some of the more simple apps working alright, but most of these would already be simple enough for our own development community to create running natively on the platform.
Another possible negative, is the high likelihood of this just ending up a pirates gangplank  for iOS apps on Android. While there would surely be a great many users that would love this idea, it would only irritate the developers that we need, and continue to fuel the false assumption that Android’s user base is made up of a bunch of freeloaders. Not only would we need to have the emulator up and running, but we would need some type of method for getting the games on our phones in a way where the developers are not being ripped off. This leads me to the last issue I have with this.
We have the emulator and the iOS apps both sold in the Android market. Now this would solve the second issue, but not the first, while also introducing a third issue. This would be Adobe Air all over again. How many of you remember when Air was released along with a pretty big bundle of Air Apps. Now each of these apps did have a disclaimer about needing Air to be installed first, but that didn’t stop users from complaining about the app not working properly. If I’m not mistaken this was pretty quickly rectified by pushing the user back to the market to download Air if it was not installed after launching the application. Either way it detracts from the user experience. While it’s no big deal for the readers of this site, it does perpetuate the idea that Android is not as friendly as iOS, for the average user.
This is a very interesting Kickstart, so if you feel like chipping in by all means do so. You can find their Kickstarter page here.
Is there something I’m overlooking? Am I overreacting?
Let me know what you think.
Via Techcrunch
