As you know applications, information systems and other software products go out of date very fast. But what if you have a long-lasting project, an idea which takes time for its realization?
We mean longer time than applicability of your device lasts. What will you do if progress catches you half-way up to your success?
Let’s suppose that you have a program that effectively solves your business issues on a hardware platform and you want to transfer such a program to another environment.For solving this problem such a process as porting is widely used – it means adaptation of a program from one technical background to another one.
In this article we will try to discuss one of the topical subjects in the sphere of high technologies: porting of applications from the best mobile operation system to the second best.
iOS vs Android
At the present time the markets of iOS and Android are experiencing a boom of popularity. That’s why nowadays any company striving to obtain a mobile application for its business promotion can face a serious problem: how to present such an application to the users of iPhone as well to the users of Android?
As a result a lot of the companies give preference to iPhone as iOS is considered to be the system for corporate users while Android is mostly for personal needs. But soon enough it may become necessary for some companies to port their software to another platform to expand their business activity. Considering that Android market share is much bigger than iOS.
Porting processes from iOS to Android are not equal at all. Key difference is that there are only three gadgets with iOS system: iPhone, iPod and iPad. At the same time there is an infinite number of Android devices – and day by day they appear increasingly.
Moreover, all the Android devices are unique and peculiar: they have different shape of screen, display aspect ratio etc. In reliance on all that difficulties, there can arise many problems during the porting from iOS to Android. Let’s consider the most consequential of them.
The most of applications have more than one language version. Each language has its own specific sign system which may not be supported in certain electronic devices. For example the sign systems of English and German totally differ from the sign system of Russian. That is why each text looks in its own way in each specific language version of an application.
For example the native support of Arabic alphabet is absent in Android. And when in the course of porting of an application from iOS implementers faced such a problem they decided to generate each text screen as an image. And only then the Arabic symbols were displayed properly.
Interface and design
The most typical mistake in such a case is to copy the application interface of iPhone to Android. First of all it must be taken into account, that Android users are got used to a certain interface. And if in some program the elements will be composed in absolutely another way, significant inconveniences can arise. You should know very comprehensively the features of both the platforms.
Problems with media files
As against to iOS Android gadgets are not always designed to the full extend for working with audio and video files. You should be ready to sudden soft failures and in particular to the problems connected with user interface. For example at start of the video the screen can flash or some video and audio files can be displayed in slow motion.
In some iOS applications the ability of connecting a gadget to other devices through Bluetooth is of a great importance. For example the applications for health professionals. They often need to connect several devices through Bluetooth for gathering and transferring of information about a patient’s condition etc. Such applications effectually function on iOS platform but in the case of their migration to Android it will be like a jump to another dimension. Furthermore there is another peculiarity to be taken into consideration: each device can establish a restricted number of Bluetooth connections and for different Android devices this number may vary.
Price for porting services is extremely variable. It depends on multiple factors: to which Android version do you want to port your iOS application? Do you want your application to be supported by Android tablets? Should the tablet version’s screens differ in any way? Etc.
Furthermore you must take into account that Android market is much different from iOS. For example a major part of Android applications are free to download. But at the same time Android market is much more open than iOS – you can even distribute your applications putting them on your web site or via email. So you will need to shape a specific strategy to establish your business there.
So how to conquer the market?
Unfortunately it can be concluded that far not all the IOS applications are to be ported to Android. The reason is significant discrepancy between structure and engineering specification of two platforms. In its turn the adaptable iOS applications require a diligent and long-term testing processes on Android platform to avoid all the possible bugs. The most suitable programs for porting from iOS to Android so far are gaming applications. In this case porting process is mostly achieved by Apportable SDK – the program that compilates iOS Objective-C code to the machine code and gives implementer an opportunity to transmit his applications to Android in an hour’s time without any performance loss.
So if you have business with gaming applications the two chairs foremost will be yours, if your activity is connected with other kinds of applications you can only reckon on about one and a half chair, that is also quite a few on the contemporary market of high technologies.