Re: gtk apps on iOS/Android?

[Michael Torrie <torriem gmail com>]

On 09/09/2012 11:40 PM, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> interesting, wouldnt the quartz backend for osx build for iOS ?
>
> not exactly sure but I think the NSView and highlevel cocoa stuff
> is built upon the same low level windowing apis that are available
> on osx...

I'm sure it could be ported of course.  But there's really no point.
Apple is unlikely to allow a GTK+ app in the app store anyway, as they
require apps to use the native UI toolkit as part of their brand image.

As well, porting an app to mobile platforms is more than just simply
recompiling.  The UI principles on a phone or tablet are different than
a desktop (despite Unity and Gnome 3's belief to the contrary).  Even
with GTK+ supporting touch and other mobile things, it's the widget
layout that is going to be different.  So an application's UI really
needs to be redesigned from scratch on the mobile anyway.

GTK+ could be ported to Android of course, but again, but that would
require considerable effort.  Laying aside Java for a moment, Android
apps are built and run very differently than desktop apps.  The
application life cycle is quite different.

There is/was an attempt to "port" Qt to iOS, but it wouldn't have been a
real port.  Rather it would be a thin layer over cocoa, using the
underlying Cocoa UI widgets, file APIs, and network APIs.

I am not involved with either iOS or Android development, so I stand
corrected if my thinking is in error.