The Debate about which Operating system is better, Android or iOS can go on till centuries.
But who wins it?
For some it’s Android while some choose iOS. Although, iOS has an upper hand over Android but personal choices also play a major role here.
Apple got a position higher than Android because of the apps for Smartphone which Android could catch up in the later while. In other words, iOS could show off its exclusivity for apps like Instagram, IFTTT and more for a long time. Surprisingly, the Play Store has more apps than the Apple Store and it witnesses more downloads too. Android’s huge market has helped balance the gap. It also lends a hand to the developers of Android to get significantly more freedom to develop what
they want as compared iOS, because of the fairly relaxed publishing policy.
But for everybody who holds a Smartphone, especially those technology freaks; they dream of a Smart phone that can run both iOS as well as Android apps. It would be a win-win situation as Android users would be able to use iMessage, while iOS users would be able to customise their device’s Home screen. Now guess what? These dreams could soon be fulfilled with Project Cider.
Cider is a unique software which provides an architecture capable of running iOS and Android apps simultaneously which is designed by the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. This software doesn’t provide a dual-boot solution, instead as quoted by the team of the project, “Cider runs domestic binaries, those developed for a given device’s OS, the domestic OS, and foreign binaries, those developed for a different OS, the foreign OS, together on the same device.”
So, it enables foreign apps (iOS) to access the host device libraries (Android), for proprietary software and hardware interfaces such as graphic acceleration hardware. This means iOS location finder apps can make use of the GPS on the device, without using any software like a virtual machine.
“Users can interact with iOS apps using multi-touch input, and iOS apps can leverage GPU hardware to display smooth, accelerated graphics. The microbenchmark and app measurements of a study show that Cider imposes modest performance overhead, and can deliver faster performance for iOS apps than corresponding Android counterparts on Android hardware. The faster performance is due to the greater efficiencies of running native iOS code instead of interpreted bytecode as used by Android.”
The team of developers also said that apps can tap into Location and GPS services on a device. It was activated after the first paper was released. Technology market is not expecting a market-ready version of this compatibility ecosystem in nearby future. As there could be a host of IP and copyright troubles heading there way, but the concept shows that the dreams of having a perfect OS is possible!
Web Geometrics is an emerging Mobile Application Development company in India, Primarily into Android application development and iPhone application development.