Comment by MBCook
6 hours ago
Is this significantly useful to anyone?
It’s a neat accomplishment. And it was worth doing for that alone. Absolutely hacker worthy.
But as someone with an Apple Silicon Mac, I can run iOS apps on my computer if the developer has allowed it and I don’t. I’ve never come up with an actual need. It turns out it’s never really a problem for me.
The few things I use a lot on my phone already have desktop equivalents. The long tail stuff tends to be stuffed that I wouldn’t really use from my computer anyway. Like locking my car or using a banking app. One I don’t need, the other is already covered by the website.
So I’m wondering if anyone has found a strong use for this kind of tools.
What about that chinese cat feeder whose app requires a suspicious number of permissions, and requires max version of android 2 versions behind the current one?
Or maybe your security camera has a "free" plan without motion detection, and you just keep the app running with a screen grab on top to do your own AI motion detection.
Or my eero router, which doesn't have a web interface... etc etc.
There's a million cheap hardware gadgets that are going to lose sw support at some time, and stop being functional. This will help a lot with that.
Then I can probably vibecode a native reverse-engineered solution to both those specific problems in less effort than it took to vibecode an Android translator for Mac.
>What about that chinese cat feeder whose app requires a suspicious number of permissions, and requires max version of android 2 versions behind the current one?
Did you read the project page? This runs with no sandbox. If you want to run shady chinese apps, you should be running it in android emulator (a VM), not this translation layer.
As someone who develops iOS and Android apps, I run production, store-installed variants on my Mac all the time for iOS apps. It's pretty nice and would be cool if I could do the same for Android.
>It's pretty nice and would be cool if I could do the same for Android.
android emulator?
If I could I would do it during development. The app I work on needs hardware so it’s not an option.
For me, the main use would be any app where I would like to type a decent amount.
I hate typing on non-physical keyboards.