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Cross-Compiling Android Applications to iOS and Windows Phone 7

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Abstract

Android is currently leading the smartphone segment in terms of market share since its introduction in 2007. Android applications are written in Java using an API designed for mobile apps. Other smartphone platforms, such as Apple’s iOS or Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, differ greatly in their native application programming model. App developers who want to publish their applications for different platforms are required to re-implement the application using the respective native SDK. In this paper we describe a cross-compilation approach, whereby Android applications are cross-compiled to C for iOS and to C# for Windows Phone 7. We describe different aspects of our cross-compiler, from byte code level cross-compilation to API mapping. A prototype of our cross-compiler called XMLVM is available under an Open Source license.

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Acknowledgement

This paper is an extended version of a conference publication [3]. The WP7 backend of XMLVM was supported by a grant from Microsoft Research. As with any Open Source project, XMLVM is the result of many volunteers. We are greatly indebted to their contributions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94132, USA

    Arno Puder & Oren Antebi

Authors
  1. Arno Puder
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  2. Oren Antebi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Arno Puder.

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Puder, A., Antebi, O. Cross-Compiling Android Applications to iOS and Windows Phone 7. Mobile Netw Appl 18, 3–21 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-012-0374-2

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