A video has been posted online of the Playbook from Blackberry running applications made for the iOS operating system, inside of an emulator. In the video it shows the user playing games such as Tiny Tower and Super Monkey Ball. Following days of display the developer decided to open up and respond and showed more apps running on the system. However the developer of the emulator app said that he did not know if he would ever release the app, but failed to say why.
BlackBerry PlayBook runs iOS apps in addition to Android
The video was posted in the Crackberry Forums and said that he had gone along the lines of how WINE works to make apps for the Windows work on the OS X and Linux operating systems. The bulk of the coding was in engineering Objective C libraries which are needed for apps from iOS to work properly within the player. the app code didn’t have to be pre-processed or even recompiled in order to use the emulator as the ARM environment on both the Playbook and the iPhone are very similar.
The developer said he was willing to test iOS apps from other coders to provide proof and to work on refinement of the player. There are some app restrictions such as no DRM, universal binary or specific compilation for ARMV6, along with 480 x 320 resolution and no network access required, plus others. Also the developer will not accept applications that come from the App Store, which is a critical issue for the emulator sourcing software. Legally of course any emulator falls into the gray area, creating and using the software is quite legal whereas getting software to emulate is not. When taking apps from the App Store to use in emulator, even those that are free would more than likely see you in a legal battle.
The developer’s website does offer a tool that packs Android 2.3.3 apps to work on the Playbook. If the emulator app was ever released and it was in distribution this would mean that the Playbook would be the first device capable of running applications from all three of the top players, Blackberry, Apple and Android. Furthermore, the BlackBerry PlayBook would be the only other tablet besides the iPad to run iOS apps.
