One of the key components of Google’s Android operating system is the Dalvik virtual machine which is required to run Android applications. But now there’s a new open source project called In-The-Box which brings Dalvik to iOS, allowing you run Android apps on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.
The process isn’t all that simple at this point, and the project is really geared at developers rather than end users. Don’t expect to be able to download an app from the Android Market and simply port it to your iPhone on your own. But developers can use the tools to get their Android apps up and running on iOS with just a few minor changes, and eventually we could see those apps in the App Store.
That could eventually make the process of developing cross-platform apps much simpler. Instead of writing apps from scratch for each platform, In-The-Box could make it possible to simply write Android apps and quickly port them to iOS — assuming Apple approves the apps. Of course, Android and iOS devices have different function keys and other hardware, so odds are you’ll want to make some changes to the overall user interface for your apps if developing for both platforms anyway.
You can check out a demo video after the break.
