Cider lets you run iOS apps on your Android phone.

Tencent Digital Message (compiled: Zhang Xiumei) iOS platform compared to the Android platform, one of the biggest advantages is a complete high-quality applications. Although the application quality of the Android system is improving, it still has a certain gap with the iOS platform on the whole. But now, developers have come up with a surprising possibility that they can run iOS apps on Android, and there is no doubt that there is another good choice for the vast majority of users. According to foreign media TNW, six PhD students at Columbia University have recently developed a project called Cider, a framework for running iOS apps on Android. This feat, instead of using a strict virtual machine, runs domestic and foreign binaries on the same device, using binary compatibility techniques such as compile-time code phase adaptation and diplomacy. This also means that cider needs to convince the application code that runs on the Apple xnu kernel so that it can replicate libraries and frames. At the same time, they have released a proof-of-concept video showing the results of their work running iOS apps on Nexus 7. Despite the unsatisfactory performance, this is not surprising given the additional external function calls and the currently incomplete OpenGL ES implementations. More importantly, using the OS compatibility layer allows iOS apps to be implemented natively on Android, which is an impressive move in itself. It is also mentioned in the report that Android apps can still run on the device even at the abstraction level of the operating system. The team said their approach did not face any fundamental constraints on compatibility between the two operating systems. That said, it's still a prototype, and it's definitely not going to be perfect in some applications. At present, cider is only a model structure, the finished product is not finished yet. The team said cider could not retrofit applications that require the support of other functions on smartphones and tablets, such as GPS, cameras, mobile radios, Bluetooth, and so on, unless they provide a rollback code path. But the good news is that the team says they will continue to develop cider, and if the application matures, these restrictions will no longer exist. Source: liliputing, TNW