Need help with direction for app porting.
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As the title implies. I am stuck right now in my plan of attack. I have been doing a lot of research into porting APK's for anbox as well looking into learning about porting appimage's to arm64. Both have equal amount of work but is making me scatterbrained. Which out of the two options seems more viable for me in terms of direction to take?
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@Ultimoore
Hi, I know little about porting APK or appimages.
But let me ask a few questions.What exactly do you want to do ?
Port third party existing apps to Ubuntu Touch or port your own apps ?
Do you have the source code for those apps ?This might help others give you a better answer.
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The current packaging technology used in UT is Click. It is a precursor to Snap packages. But AFAIK neither Snap, Flatpacks or Appimages work right now on Ubuntu Touch. Apks with Anbox is experimental and really only good for apps you can't port.
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@AppLee i am wanting to port third party apps. Lol I would never subject anyone to my own monstrosity.
I know almost all of the snaps and appimage's are open source. As far as APKs go, I am only as far as obtaining apks. I am still waiting for responses from some of the devs for the source. -
Most Android apps (APKs) are going to be Java using native APIs, and cannot be easily "ported" as one things. Instead, a whole new app will likely need to be written. Maybe things like Ionic could be made to work on top of Morph browser instead, which would make "porting" doable for some of those apps.
Also, proprietary apps for proprietary services will almost certainly not give out the source, so you won't be able to port them.
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@dobey much appreciated on the info.