Dalvik ported to MeeGo, promising instant Android app compatibility | Hacker News Reader

Dalvik ported to MeeGo, promising instant Android app compatibility

linuxfordevices.com

48 pointsTsiolkovsky19 comments

While the article mentions MeeGo, the N900 in the video is clearly running Maemo. The article briefly mentions that Maemo support might be possible, but the video out and out proves it.

Going even further than that however, the maemo.org folks discovered that they're using Qt in the background, and so presumably, this could be ported pretty easily over to a Symbian device.

This doesn't mean that Google will give MeeGo access to the Android market, meaning that it will increase the work for developers to support the multiple platforms.

Having your APK in multiple markets is laughably trivial.

But regardless, what a way to try to dig a negative out of a story like this.

I realize how easy it is, I just wanted to point out that they still won't have market access.

I'm of the opinion that Nokia should just move to Android - they make nice hardware but they need better software and should stop spinning their wheels and partner with Google on Android. Don't get me wrong, I love my n810, but I'd like to see Android on a lot of hardware Nokia makes.

I don't know much about how the UI widgets are implemented on Android -

Is it such that Nokia/Intel could reimplement these and have Android apps look consistent with MeeGo UI, or will developer have to do some UI tweaking in order to look reasonable on the different OSes?

EDIT: I suppose this same question also applies to the similar Dalvik implementation on the BlackBerry Playbook that's been rumored.

Instant app compatibility? Wouldn't they also need to provide the same set of APIs that Android provides?

They do. I think they've ported almost the entire Android userspace and called it "Dalvik".

Can anyone tell us how many more platforms/phones/devices and what not I'll need to think about supporting because of this? And I do mean "needt o think about" rather than "have to."

None; MeeGo was dead yesterday and now it's still dead.

Do you support FreeBSD when you release code for Linux?

I thought not. Same thing here.

a) why didn't nokia do this 12months ago?

b) dalvic is apache licensed so Myriad wont have to release the code

You have to think like a Nokia exec.

They were a leader in smartphones but now have no viable smartphone OS.

Somebody ports Android to their smartphone hardware

The correct response is to delay the release of the next version of meego to improve the security to prevent this sort of hacking.

In response to a) - Nokia wants (wanted?) their own platform. The last thing they have wanted to do is support Android in any form.

All that might be about to change though - they are announcing some strategy changes on Friday.

a) that would make it easy for competing platform to be run on top of their own "next big thing". kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? they could just start building android devices outright.

That is actually great news. No Qt needs to be ported to Android. Then it's get really interesting.

Qt for Android? Done: http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/

Makes the "Blackberry tablet to run Android apps" rumor slightly more interesting, even if to think about rather than necessarily believing that particular rumor.

the problem with maemo/meego isn't the app ecosystem, it's the half-assed platform itself! there were all the apps that I could possibly need on my n900, it's just wasn't very enjoyable to use them. for example the built-in browser sucks on both maemo 4 and 5. thankfully Opera is still building their mobile browser for both, so my n810 is quite usable device after 3 years.

I'm using the N900's browser right now. It's quite enjoyable for the most part :)

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