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Jolla’s Sailfish OS gains Android compatibility
- Zigurd 13y agoThis is probably done with technology licensed from Myriad Group, which is a roll-up of several mobile handset technology licencors. They had quite a brisk business in J2ME VMs, MMS software, etc. But most of their product lines were aimed at feature phones and have been in decline for some time now. However, they were the first to demonstrate Android app compatibility on Meego. At the time I saw this demonstrated, they were using their own VM, which runs Java bytecode, and not the Dalvik VM. This has the disadvantage that you need to modify the Android app build process to create jar files with Java bytecodes. But, because all Android apps are translated from Java bytecodes to Dalvik bytecodes, and because the Dalvik VM semantics is very nearly identical to Java VM semantics, this should work just fine except for the inconvenience of either having to recompile or otherwise transform your apps into a form that can be used on a Java VM. This may have changed since then, and they may be using Dalvik now. There are no licensing obstacles to doing that. At that time I had a personal interest in Android app compatibility since I was CTO at a company doing the same thing with a different approach. So I can say there is really nothing standing in the way of good compatibility with Android apps on any Linux-based mobile OS, and other OSs are possible as well. Systems like this should work very well and developers should not need to modify any code. When products like this actually get released, basic Android compatibility should not be the differentiator. Things like how well the home/desktop of the native OS is integrated, whether an app widget host is provided, etc. are going to be where differences are likely to arise.