Objective-C and Android [closed]

Step back and think about what in the end you will logically be able to share.

The UI models are fairly different, the components are different. In the end what you might be able to share is data object classes, possibly some algorithms. It's not even like you could realistically end up sharing network code as in the old days because you aren't directly using sockets, you are using HTTP libraries.

So will all of the effort you are putting into this really find a payoff in the end? It seems to me the end result will be a brittle mess that is hard to update, and is mediocre on both platforms instead of being great on either.

Why are you writing applications? To make life easier for you, or your users?

Others have said basically this, but I'd like to make it more explicit. Your best bet is probably to write:

1. Cross-platform data models & core logic, using:
   • bits of GNUstep (Obj-C), or
   • CF-Lite (C), or
   • Whatever you'd like, as long as it's cross-platform :P
2. iPhone-only interface code, using Cocoa Touch (Obj-C)
3. Android-only interface code, however they do it for the Android.

That's as close as you can get; any attempt to write cross-platform interface code will undoubtedly result in a mediocre app on both platforms. But making all the rest of your code portable and just wrapping a device-specific interface around it is done all the time and has been worked great for some iPhone developers.

Objective-C without Cocoa is not so useful and won't bring you much closer to haveing a working iPhone codebase. You'd probably be better off writing your core in C with Core Foundation and using either Java or Objective-C for the platform specific parts. Apple has open sourced a large chunk of Core Foundation as CF-Lite, and it's toll-free bridged with Cocoa on OS X (i.e. you can use many CF classes interchangeably with their Cocoa counterparts).