Apportable

Cross-platform iOS development

At Apportable, we believe:

Rewriting your app to support other platforms is a waste of a developer's time and creativity.

Developers should be able to use the best tools and languages to develop mobile apps that work on multiple platforms.

About Apportable

Founded Winter 2011 with YCombinator
First app, Osmos, shipped January, 2012
Raised $2.4m led by Google Ventures
Today power dozens of best sellers on Android

What exactly is the Apportable SDK?

The Apportable SDK compiles your Objective-C (iOS) source code into a native application that runs on Android

What Apportable is NOT

It is NOT source code translation
It does NOT generate Java
It is NOT an iOS emulator on Android (i.e. WINE)

How does Apportable work exactly?

What trickery is this?

Lets port something!

Visit www.apportable.com and sign up
Install the SDK and toolchain
Open a terminal and navigate to your source code
Plugin an Android device

Run apportable load and answer a few questions about your app
Thats it. You should see your app running on Android!

The Apportable SDK includes...

Frameworks
& Libraries

UIKit

Boost

ICU

libpng, libgif, libtiff, libjpeg

CoreGraphics

OpenAL

CoreAnimation

libobjc

C++11 (libc++)

libc

libdispatch

Core Foundation

Foundation

The same clang compiler used in Xcode

Our own fork of clang with added support for Android

Debugging and tools

Latest GDB
Our own Apportable profiler suite

memory, network, performance
resembles a mini instruments

Support for many binary 3rd party libraries

Flurry, AdMob, Chartboost, etc.

Most source libraries work out of the box (Facebook, DropBox, etc.)

The Best Features

ARC
C++11
Assembly
Objective-C literals
Objective-C Runtime API (swizzling, etc)

Essentially, you ship a user land implementation of the iOS libraries in your app with Apportable.

Only 6mb of dependencies.

We have done the hard work of supporting the fragmentation in Android

Customizing For Android

A little optimization goes a long way towards presenting a native experience on Android.

Customizing your Android build

Edit the .approj directory generated next to xcode project
In the <project>.approj/configuration.json file you can:

Add and remove source files
Tweak the APKs features and permissions on Android
Change defines, icons, and other settings

Support More Screen Resolutions

Handling the native resolution is best and will always look the better
If you made assumptions about iOS screen sizes, you can emulate them on Android and scale your UI up with UIScreenModes

#ifdef ANDROID
  [UIScreen mainScreen].currentMode = 
     [UIScreenMode emulatedMode:UIScreenBestEmulatedMode];
#endif

Add Hardware Button Support

 - (void)buttonUpWithEvent:(UIEvent *)event
 {
    switch (event.buttonCode)
    {
        case UIEventButtonCodeBack:
            // handle back button if possible,             // otherwise exit(0)
            break;
        case UIEventButtonCodeMenu:
            // show menu if possible.
            break;
        default:
            break;
    }
 }

 - (BOOL)canBecomeFirstResponder
 {
    return YES;
 }

Use different device information

UIDevice+Apportable.h

@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *nativeCPUABI; 
// e.g. "armeabi-v7a"@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *nativeModel;  
// e.g. @"Xoom"

@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *nativeManufacturer;
// e.g. @"Motorola"
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *nativeSystemVersion;  
// e.g. @"4.2"

@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSUInteger nativeSDKVersion;  
// e.g. Froyo is 8

@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *macAddress; 
// requires access_wifi_state

@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *odin; 
// open device identifier number

@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *nativeSecureIdentifier;

@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *telephonyIdentifier; 
// read_phone_state
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSString *carrierBranding;  
// e.g. @"Verizon"

BridgeKit

BridgeKit is a fully Objective-C API for bridging to Java and calling Android APIs or custom Java code
Used to back much of UIKit and system APIs

http://static.apportable.com/documentation/BridgeKit/html/

Bridging Application Lifecycle

Apportable backs iOS lifecycle events with their Android counterparts

application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: --> Activity.onCreate

applicationDidBecomeActive: --> Activity.onResume
applicationDidEnterBackground: --> Activity.onStop

When apps are in the background, Apportable emulates iOS behavior by suspending them

Push Notifications and Local Notifications

Push notifications are handled by Google Cloud Messaging on Google Play Apps

Other push notification services such as Parse and Urban Airship are supported as well

Local notifications translate to a custom alarm service

In App Purchasing (StoreKit)

Apportable store kit bridges to Google In App Billing (on Google Play) and Amazon Payments (on Amazon App Store)
Near full StoreKit compatibility

Framework Support

Foundation - Near full coverage. Major revision in development

CoreFoundation - Common classes covered. Full support in development

CoreAnimation - Limited. New version in development backed by OpenGL

UIKit - Current shipping version is limited to simple UIKit apps. Full UIKit support backed by new CoreAnimation in development

CoreData - Working. Limited to automatic migration support only

AVFoundation - Audio but no video support

MediaPlayer - Video and audio supported (codecs depend on device, ogg is the most universal)

OpenGL and OpenAL - Full coverage of latest versions

iOS 7 Features

SpriteKit - In development; currently 20% faster than iOS (even on iOS)
GameController API ready

OpenGL based UIKit preview

Cocos2D

The most popular open source Obj-C game engine, cocos2d-iphone, is maintained by Apportable engineers.
SpriteBuilder (formerly CocosBuilder), an animation editor for cocos2d, is developed by Apportable engineers.
Chipmunk Obj-C physics engine (included in cocos2d) is developed by Apportable engineers.
cocos3d also sponsored by Apportable
And more! http://github.com/apportable

About me

My name is Zac Bowling
Platform Engineer at Apportable
115+ hackathons in the last 4+ years (may of seen me in Wired Magazine, Business Insider, or Dutch public television)
Email: zac@apportable.com