The app store battle that used to rage between Apple Inc. and Google Inc. appears to have finally cooled down, with both parties seemingly happy that they have a huge enough catalogue of apps to satisfy even the most voracious smart phone user. However, some of the app distribution platforms (seriously, lets get this naming convention sorted out) on other systems leave a lot to be desired. Research In Motion Ltd.’s App World, Nokia Corp.’s Ovi Store, and Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Palm App Catalogue all could use an extra injection of apps (especially the latter). It looks as though a company called Myriad Group AG may have come up with a solution to boost those numbers – by running Android apps on your mobile OS of choice through an intermediary piece of software.
All Android apps are run through Dalvik, a virtual machine that forms an important part of the Android operating system. Being open source, the clever people at Myriad have now taken this virtual machine and made it work on devices with third-party operating systems.
They’re planning to show the software – dubbed Alien Dalvik – at Mobile World Congress, and release it for Nokia and Intel Corp.’s Meego OS later this year.
“Alien Dalvik enables the majority of Android applications to run unmodified, allowing application store owners to quickly kick start Android application store services by simply repackaging Android Package (APK) files.”
Actually enabling the apps is the easy part – getting them on to other devices will be slightly more tricky. The Google App Market is one of the few elements of Android that is closed-source (a few others being GMail and Google Maps), and cannot be installed – legally at least – on a device without Google’s blessing. Will Google allow Market installation on a non-Android device? We’re guessing no. However, Amazon’s in-the-works curated Android Market may well fit the bill.
Expect to hear more about this fairly interesting bit of software next week at Mobile World Congress, in the meantime you can see it on video here.
