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IOS Apps Demonstrated Running on BlackBerry PlayBook (crackberry.com)
24 points by zainny on June 12, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments


Due to the complexity and breadth of the iOS APIs, I have my doubts that this is a reimplementation, especially one completed by one developer.

If that's not the case, this would be technically feasible, but of dubious legality.


But as with all things, you don't need anything like 100% coverage to get an app to work. Just handle the obvious stuff, and patch as needed until your target works. Then repeat. This is how WINE worked in the early days: you don't start with a copy of the win32 API, you start with a program you want to run and see where it fails.

Most apps, for obvious reasons, use only a tiny fraction of the platform. And those bits they do use aren't always critical. Facebook, for example, wants location information but would be happy if you just lied to it and gave it a hard coded value.


And -- as with WINE! -- games probably use much fewer of the overall APIs than a "desktop" application (like Facebook) would. There's no need for any of the complicated UI widgets, for instance.


The developer provides some additional information in the forum which I found interesting: http://forums.crackberry.com/news-rumors-f40/real-fake-ios-a...

But yes, quite an amazing achievement for just one person.


How much longer until he gets a cease and desist from apple? (Or is emulation legal?)


Emulation is absolutely legal. There is a long history of emulators of all sorts in the market. And of course there was an important decision just last week that held without ambiguity that the mere interface to a program is not covered by copyright.


I'm actually curious about this as well, is this actually legal? If it is similar to Wine, then isn't it just as legal as running Windows games in Linux environments?


I'm buying myself a Playbook. They're on clearance everywhere (more so than they already were) now that they're being discontinued.




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