HowTo Port iPhone/iOS Games to Android

iPhone/iOS platform is rich for its apps and games and that’s why every game developer has atleast developed 2 tittles on the platform. Android market is versatile as well, but still lot of popular games are yet to be ported due to the time it eats to port individual apps to the new platform.

Java and Objective C have their own programming syntactical paradigms. I’ve been a programmer for both the platforms and I understand the effort required to rewrite whole app to make it work on another platform. On one side where iPhone/iOS platform demands MVC patterns everywhere, Android revolves heavily around UI/Activities. Games in particular use similar Open GL standards, but dies to syntactical differences can be painful for porting.

How to Port iPhone/iOS Games to Android

Unity Technologies made its Unity Android software to ease the pain for developers who are porting iPhone/iOS Games to android. According to the company, the process of porting a game from iOS to Android can be as simple as changing the target platform and clicking “Build.”

I’ve been testing their Unity software for few months now, and as far as I know, using Unity Pro for Android, over 50 game developers have ported titles from iOS to Android. Some of these include Rocket Bunny, Abduction, Samurai II: Vengeance, Breakout Kings, Castle Warriors, Doodle Bowling and others.

I just wish this app was free, but its not. Unity software is free but the Android add-on costs $400. Unity Pro goes upto $1500. Checkout about their licenses over here.

For those who heard the name “Unity Technologies” for the first time, they are quiet old and currently have over 400,000 registered users  including major brands and indies, students and hobbyist developers, too that use them for building games for the Web, mobile and consoles as well as to create other interactive 3D content including training simulations and medical and architectural visualizations.

Unity 3D game demo:

Getting started guided video:

Unity Features:

Integrated Editor — Users can deploy a single project to multiple platforms, including Android, using a one-click solution that just works. Porting a game from iOS to Android can be as simple as changing the target platform and clicking “Build.”

Support for upcoming Android devices, including Tegra Tablets and the Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY Smartphone — Users can be among the first to benefit from releasing games on the exciting range of Android-based gaming platforms.

Optimized Graphics Pipeline for OpenGL ES 2.0 — Unity Technologies has been working directly with hardware manufacturers such as NVIDIA and Qualcomm to get every last bit of performance out of Android so that users can create stunning games without worrying about the subtle difference between devices.

Android Remote — Developers can use their actual Android phone as an input device to view and test their game directly within the authoring tool.

You can download the Unity SDK from here.

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Related: How To Develop iPhone Apps on Windows

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