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I think if someone could find a way to make an iOS compatible operating system (e.g. Current iOS applications could be built & run on the system with little mod

I think if someone could find a way to make an iOS compatible operating system (e.g. Current iOS applications could be built & run on the system with little modification), then it would be a huge hit. Not sure of the legal implications, for de facto reverse engineering, but it would at least put out another option.

zzzcpan 7y ago
It's legal, but binary blobs are not compatible with privacy first approach. And it's a lot of work to reverse engineer and build such compatibility.
saagarjha 7y ago
This sounds a bit like what osmeta was doing–although it was ironically acquired by Facebook…
ampdepolymerase 7y ago
Correlium, currently being sued by Apple.
oscargrouch 7y ago
I dont think this is a good idea, because it would need a lot of cash and man-hours to burn just to have a mediocre finished mockup at the end. Microsoft had a better approach once, still expensive/buggy, but at least more doable, which was adapting the various iOS kits and calling back window primitives in the backend. And yet, they abandoned because its also a bad move in the sense that nobody will care about your platform if they just need to target iOS. You will be doomed and have to chase and implement everything they do in iOS, even if it doesnt make sense, and nobody will care about your platform. You will also end with more bugs and application crashes, so your platform will be seing as something inferior to Apple (emphasizing the "nobody cares about you" effect) By the way, Blackberry took that route by implementing Android and we can see how nobody cares about Blackberry as an app platform, because in the end you know they will have to follow Android. For me the only way to get out of this trap, is to have a distinct platform, that for some reason, people want to develop for it. I mean, the web did this trick once, Linux is also doing this. Its doable, but its a lot of hard work and community effort based a lot in other goals other than cash. Another way to do this trick, is to create a consortium, and to create some base API, inspired by iOS, Android and the Web, and to have a lot of industry leaders onboard. They would need to finance the prototype or the reference implementation on top of something like Linux. It was tried with Tizen, but given it was more of a Samsumg project without community to drive it forward it failed. Also, i dont think it can compete with Android and iOS in platform quality.. so this probably was also one of the reasons they have failed.

zzzcpan 7y ago

It's legal, but binary blobs are not compatible with privacy first approach. And it's a lot of work to reverse engineer and build such compatibility.

saagarjha 7y ago

This sounds a bit like what osmeta was doing–although it was ironically acquired by Facebook…

ampdepolymerase 7y ago

Correlium, currently being sued by Apple.

oscargrouch 7y ago

I dont think this is a good idea, because it would need a lot of cash and man-hours to burn just to have a mediocre finished mockup at the end. Microsoft had a better approach once, still expensive/buggy, but at least more doable, which was adapting the various iOS kits and calling back window primitives in the backend. And yet, they abandoned because its also a bad move in the sense that nobody will care about your platform if they just need to target iOS. You will be doomed and have to chase and implement everything they do in iOS, even if it doesnt make sense, and nobody will care about your platform. You will also end with more bugs and application crashes, so your platform will be seing as something inferior to Apple (emphasizing the "nobody cares about you" effect) By the way, Blackberry took that route by implementing Android and we can see how nobody cares about Blackberry as an app platform, because in the end you know they will have to follow Android. For me the only way to get out of this trap, is to have a distinct platform, that for some reason, people want to develop for it. I mean, the web did this trick once, Linux is also doing this. Its doable, but its a lot of hard work and community effort based a lot in other goals other than cash. Another way to do this trick, is to create a consortium, and to create some base API, inspired by iOS, Android and the Web, and to have a lot of industry leaders onboard. They would need to finance the prototype or the reference implementation on top of something like Linux. It was tried with Tizen, but given it was more of a Samsumg project without community to drive it forward it failed. Also, i dont think it can compete with Android and iOS in platform quality.. so this probably was also one of the reasons they have failed.