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We’d love to see the Nokia
N9‘s polycarbonate case stuffed with Android apps as much as the next geek, but our interview with the company that can make it happen reveals it’s far from a done deal.
The Nokia N9 runs MeeGo, and it looks as though it could be the only one. That means there’s bound to be an app shortage. So it’s no wonder Nokia fans have jumped all over reports from sites such as SlashGear that software called Alien Dalvik will let us run Android apps on the phone.
Android apps are written to run on a
virtual machine called
Dalvik. Alien Dalvik makes it possible to run Android apps on MeeGo
phones like
the N9. We spoke to Myriad,
the company that makes Alien Dalvik, to find out whether we it was
worth
getting our hopes up about the Android apps on the N9.
“It’s perfectly possible,” said
Olivier Bartholot,
Myriad’s VP of business development, although he wouldn’t comment
specifically
on Nokia’s plans for Alien Dalvik on the N9.
Back in February at Mobile World Congress, Myriad
demonstrated video of Alien Dalvik
running on a Nokia
N900, which runs Maemo, the software ancestor of MeeGo. The
video below
shows it in action.
“The whole point of having Alien
Dalvik was to be able
to run the Dalvik virtual machine on a Maemo/MeeGo environment. That’s
what we
demonstrated on the N900 and there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work on
the N9
as well.”
So Alien Dalvik is a solution to the
N9’s app needs, in
theory, but it won’t be something you can install yourself, if you
end up
with an N9 in your pocket. Instead, Nokia or your network would have to
slap
Alien Dalvik on the phone.
“Because it goes really deep into the
root of the OS, it
cannot be a downloadable application. It would have to be ported prior
to the
phone being shipped. It would have to be a decision of the mobile phone
manufacturer or the network.”
We approached Nokia for new on whether it has any plans to make this happen, but it wouldn’t comment.
The BlackBerry PlayBook uses the same
Qt framework as MeeGo,
and RIM has confirmed that the tablet will run Android apps. The
PlayBook will run Android apps
in a special app player, however, rather than letting them loose in the
BlackBerry app
store.
Myriad wouldn’t
confirm whether Alien Dalvik was the method RIM was using to put
Android
apps on to the PlayBook. But Bartholot did say an app player isn’t
necessary to get Android apps on board a device.
“This was their decision in terms of
how they
implemented it. It’s certainly not the only way to do it,” Bartholot
said.
As shown in Myriad’s demo video on the N900, Android apps can take
their place
alongside native MeeGo apps on the phone, and the user need never know
the
difference.
That doesn’t mean you
could simply slap the whole
Android Market on a Nokia phone, however. Alien Dalvik doesn’t support the
lesser-used
Android APIs, so some apps in the Market won’t work on a MeeGo phone
without
some tweaking.
“We haven’t implemented 100 per cent
of the API. It’s
the rule of 20/80. Once you’ve implemented a certain number of APIs,
you’ve
covered 80 per cent of the applications that are available on the
Android
Market. If you implement more… you will not get much out of doing it.”
Examples of apps that would work with
Alien Dalvik include
Dropbox, photo and image apps, and games such as Angry Birds.
Manufacturers who use Alien Dalvik would need to filter the Android Market so only
the apps
that’ll work on their phones are available for the user.
Myriad says by making fewer
calls to the phone’s
processor, apps which have been ported from Android to MeeGo don’t run
any
slower, and they may actually save battery.
“We’re going to save 10 to 15
per cent. Is it going to
be perceived by the end user? I’m not completely sure, but certainly
we’re not
going to reduce the battery life.”
MeeGo phones like the N9 aren’t the
only phones that could
benefit from Alien Dalvik. Even the super-secret phone we’re
working on in
the Crave lab could get a taste.
“With Qt available, and if your
actual software is
based on the Linux kernel, then I think we’re safe in saying that it
will run
on the Flora Phone.”
Myriad is talking to Nokia about
bringing Alien Dalvik to
Symbian, which is also built on the Qt framework. But unsurprisingly,
the dying
platform is “not a priority” compared to MeeGo.
Following Nokia’s decision to dump
MeeGo on its upcoming
smart phones in favour of Windows Phone, it’s unlikely we’ll see
many
more MeeGo-powered phones. But there are other places where MeeGo,
Alien
Dalvik, and thus Android apps, may end up, says Bartholot.
Intel has demonstrated MeeGo on
tablets, and the Genivi
consortium of car companies have also bought into MeeGo. They won’t be
ditching the OS, despite Nokia’s choice, because their development timelines
stretch into
years rather than months.
“There are a lot of suppliers who
decided to go with MeeGo a couple of years ago. They have
very long deadlines — you’re not talking about 12 months to develop a
product,
you’re talking about years. We got in touch recently with a company
that make
planes, who have also decided to go to MeeGo for all the electronics
inside the
cockpit.”
The benefit to cars and planes isn’t
merely to get Android
apps on to their computers so they can practice landing runs with a few
rounds
of Flight Control. It’s the fact there are lots more developers
who are
familiar with writing apps for Dalvik on Android, who won’t have to
switch
languages in order to build a program that works on your car or jet.
Only time will tell if Nokia is
ultimately planning to pop
Alien Dalvik on to the N9 before we see the phone on shelves. But
now that we know for sure there’s
nothing stopping us from getting 80 per cent of Android apps on the
phone, we
won’t be happy unless we do. Get on it, Nokia.
