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Was this at all related to Apportable, which Google acquired?

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/apportable

Nope. Apportable went the other way, compiling Objective-C on Android, and linking against the Android NDK. They did have a tool for automagically converting .jar files into .frameworks (that ultimately just linked against JNI) so you could code against the Android SDK (or 3rd-party Java libraries) in Objective-C as well[0], but J2ObjC translates Java primitives and standard library classes into their corresponding Objective-C equivalents, eg java.lang.String -> NSString (although Apportable did do a few of those as well for better interoperability).

[0] There was this grand idea to make Objective-C the language for mobile development, with an "Apportable NDK" on every platform (but iOS). It wasn't that far-fetched. The NDK was terrible at the time, and Apportable's was faster, less crashy (free couldn't call malloc in low memory situations, for instance). And then Apple released Swift. And then Google came along.

The NDK has improved in the meantime, but it remains quite bad when compared with similar SDKs, including the recently released AGDK.

Better ObjC than C++, as was the case on most mobile platforms previously. Imagine, message passing everywhere.

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