University students port iOS apps over to Android with Cider

Six PhD students at Columbia University‘s Department of Computer Science have developed Cider, an OS compatibility architecture capable of running iOS apps on Android. Rather than using a strict virtual machine, they achieved the feat by running domestic and foreign binaries on the same device. They leverage binary compatibility techniques such as compile-time code adaptation and diplomatic functions. This means Cider can copy the libraries and frameworks it needs and convince an app’s code that it is running on Apple’s XNU kernel rather than Android’s Linux kernel. The performance is less than stellar, but this is to be expected given the extra cost of diplomatic function calls and a currently incomplete OpenGL ES implementation. Nevertheless, using an OS compatibility layer for native execution of iOS apps on Android is an impressive feat.