Meanwhile I ignore most of the posts here that are Apple-related, this one was able to draw my attention. Checked the 'how it works' page and was impressed how easily Claude made the 32-to-64 bit ARM translator for you. We need more effort of this kind for the x86 ecosystem, generated or not, but the mobile-app-everything culture becomes really annoying and needs to be fought this way.
bilalq 2 hours ago [-]
In practice, the Google Play Services dependencies and other walled-garden initiatives from Google will make this less useful than it could otherwise be. But still, this is really cool.
direwolf20 16 minutes ago [-]
Is this your experience or are you repeating something you heard somewhere?
paimapi 6 minutes ago [-]
I'm not the commenter but this is my experience in about 10% or so of cases. I've been running a network audit of baby tracking apps and the information they phone home with (results are pretty Orwellian so far) and a few of the apps have been virtually impossible to emulate without an active Google Play account that is verified against Google's servers.
Doohickey-d 2 hours ago [-]
I guess, in practice this can also be likely be made to run google services, the same as they can run on custom ROMs. And it already lists Aurora store as a solution.
So it's definitely something for more tinkerer people, but still quite cool.
als0 2 hours ago [-]
Everything aside from apps with SafetyNet dependencies. Banking apps come to mind.
chaosharmonic 2 hours ago [-]
Also, a lot of games. This is actually why I stopped playing Pokemon Go, and never picked up a worse gacha game habit haha
direwolf20 10 minutes ago [-]
Pokémon Go had a good reason - it turned out to be foreign intelligence gathering operation and couldn't risk being corrupted with false data.
direwolf20 11 minutes ago [-]
Banks want your money so try it anyway. Not all drive away their customers.
franga2000 2 hours ago [-]
Soo many more things than banking apps at this point. Things as normal as looking at train schedules, grocery store catalogues, ordering a taxi... sometimes have SafetyNet DRM.
When you publish apps on Google Play, the Play Developer Console even nags you to use harder obfuscation and implement Google's DRM to, allegedly, protect yourself and your users.
Can the EU finally make this shit illegal? Oh wait, they're pusing for mandatory DRM too... Fuck.
It's also pretty easy just to spin up bluestacks if you really need android apps on a mac.
chaosharmonic 2 hours ago [-]
Optimist take: this will matter less over time as more developers start targeting Steam devices
2 hours ago [-]
gambiting 2 hours ago [-]
...what steam devices? Steam Deck and Machine? I work in video games(at one of the largest publishers - worked at other two in the last few years) - and while we usually do some testing on the steam deck it's literally just to see if the windows version runs well. Full on Linux porting effort like Larian did for BG3 is very very rare and extremely hard to justify.
mgol94 40 minutes ago [-]
And I hate it with a passion. Publishers have no problem taking money from Linux users, only to ignore Linux-related bug reports and tell people “it’s not supported.”
I really hope Steam will use its position soon to either let users get refunds when devs break their games or force the gaming industry to support the Linux users they’re making money from.
Rohansi 19 minutes ago [-]
That's really what the (Deck/Machine/SteamOS) Verified program is for. Valve tests games out on those platforms and reports results back for everyone on the store page. Publishers have the control to explicitly mark it as unsupported too.
gambiting 5 minutes ago [-]
...I mean, you're buying a windows version, then complaining that it's not running well on an unsupported operating system?
freedomben 2 hours ago [-]
In your experience, is "Steam Deck Verified" attractive enough to fix any issues you might find when testing? I've been immensely curious about whether it's moved the needle at all
Rohansi 1 hours ago [-]
Most games run on Steam devices via Proton (Wine). You don't really need a native port in that case.
DaiPlusPlus 2 hours ago [-]
> Full on Linux porting effort like Larian did for BG3 is very very rare and extremely hard to justify
Given the zeitgeist, how realistic are the calls to “just get AI to do it”? I’ve been rattled by just how good some one-shot (or otherwise low-human-effort) Claude ports of some games are (and I don’t mean “decomps”, but instead where an existing open-source and already-cross-platform codebase is ported over to new targets like WASM+Canvas, like C&C Generals: the AI-bros are in full-force posting demos of their new ports on a nearly daily basis - so if it’s as easy as these people say, why aren’t we seeing it from the major publishers?
nomel 1 hours ago [-]
> why aren’t we seeing it from the major publishers?
Models are just recently capable of reliably doing this type of deeper work, which is why you're only seeing it now. There hasn't really been enough time to see it. And still, why? Modern gaming on Linux is almost always on accident, with the devs targeting windows, with no thoughts of Linux at all. Seems like it would make more sense to point the AI at wine, to make linux run Windows better.
cyanydeez 45 minutes ago [-]
figuring out how to get PWA working would be a much better goal.
bobsmooth 2 hours ago [-]
Can MicroG be ported?
f17428d27584 2 hours ago [-]
Handy for Minecraft players on Mac: windows players may be on Java or on bedrock versions, but mobile and console players are all only on bedrock. Being able to run the Android version on Mac means I can play with local console players or join a bedrock realm.
(There are compatibility workarounds if you run your own server but I don’t want the headache of doing so).
Perhaps one day Mojang will enable Macos users to run the iPad (bedrock) version of Minecraft as well..
nomel 59 minutes ago [-]
> Perhaps one day Mojang will enable Macos users to run the iPad (bedrock)
I predict they will, once macOS drops intel support in macOS 28.
40 minutes ago [-]
forgotpwd16 2 hours ago [-]
Funnily, specifically for Minecraft Bedrock, there's such a project (implementing a limited/specialized compatibility layer) targeting Linux/macOS for few years now.
And yet somehow Microsoft / Mojang don't see fit to enable Minecraft Bedrock for iPads on Macs. Pretty frustrating for cross-platform play. It's pretty funny that Bluestacks / Mac.apk work just fine for playing the Android Bedrock version on a Mac when the iOS app is right there.
VCFundedGenYer 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sirjaz 3 hours ago [-]
This is awesome, now this needs to work on Windows
Tarball10 2 hours ago [-]
Windows had something like this (Windows Subsystem for Android) which worked really well until Microsoft went and killed it.
pndy 15 seconds ago [-]
Yeah, Microsoft tried 'both ways' to expand their quite small Windows Phone applications catalogue. And while Project Astoria [1] aimed at bringing Android apps, Project Islandwood was about easing porting of iOS applications [2]. Then MS decided that Windows Phone platform has no future.
WSA was (or is, since still works unofficially) running Android in VM underneath.
majorchord 2 hours ago [-]
BlueStacks has worked really well for me.
maxloh 46 minutes ago [-]
It is based on VM, so it is a lot slower.
You can't even run Instagram on a low-end laptop.
inknight 1 hours ago [-]
isn't BlueStacks full of chinese ads nowadays?
dawnerd 1 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately. But there really isn't anything out there as reliable as it.
majorchord 56 minutes ago [-]
I wouldn't know, I block all Chinese IPs at my router.
tamimio 1 hours ago [-]
Slightly off topic, what skill/diagram tool did you use to make the diagrams?
LoganDark 2 hours ago [-]
Couple issues with this right off the bat:
- Seemingly relies on the Java virtual machine for simulation -- no support for native ARM binaries?
- Stores data inside the .app
yincrash 2 hours ago [-]
Looks like it will run native ARM just fine according to the readme?
LoganDark 1 hours ago [-]
I saw a hint of machine code recompilation in the libraries list (like capstone), but couldn't find enough to verify if recompilation doesn't just mean extracting the dalvik stuff and reformatting it to run on a normal JVM
2 hours ago [-]
leopoldcongo 42 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
iAMkenough 2 hours ago [-]
No app sandboxing? User files and settings stored in the /Applications/ folder, rather than the User’s home folder?
1 hours ago [-]
VCFundedGenYer 2 hours ago [-]
Naming it Mac.apk is a poor choice. So it's Mac.apk.app?
Overall this repo has a lot of tells of a low quality LLM generated app. Many issues with data structuring, naming etc.
(Of course it's fine to use AI tools! We use them heavily ourselves. Just please don't use them to generate or edit text to be read by fellow humans on Hacker News itself.)
It's impossible to know for sure what was LLM generated or edited, but we have to rely on imperfect classifiers or else the site would be completely flooded by genai text, which is not what the community here wants to read, nor in the intended spirit of HN.
ls-a 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 20:40:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
So it's definitely something for more tinkerer people, but still quite cool.
When you publish apps on Google Play, the Play Developer Console even nags you to use harder obfuscation and implement Google's DRM to, allegedly, protect yourself and your users.
Can the EU finally make this shit illegal? Oh wait, they're pusing for mandatory DRM too... Fuck.
I really hope Steam will use its position soon to either let users get refunds when devs break their games or force the gaming industry to support the Linux users they’re making money from.
Given the zeitgeist, how realistic are the calls to “just get AI to do it”? I’ve been rattled by just how good some one-shot (or otherwise low-human-effort) Claude ports of some games are (and I don’t mean “decomps”, but instead where an existing open-source and already-cross-platform codebase is ported over to new targets like WASM+Canvas, like C&C Generals: the AI-bros are in full-force posting demos of their new ports on a nearly daily basis - so if it’s as easy as these people say, why aren’t we seeing it from the major publishers?
Models are just recently capable of reliably doing this type of deeper work, which is why you're only seeing it now. There hasn't really been enough time to see it. And still, why? Modern gaming on Linux is almost always on accident, with the devs targeting windows, with no thoughts of Linux at all. Seems like it would make more sense to point the AI at wine, to make linux run Windows better.
(There are compatibility workarounds if you run your own server but I don’t want the headache of doing so).
Perhaps one day Mojang will enable Macos users to run the iPad (bedrock) version of Minecraft as well..
I predict they will, once macOS drops intel support in macOS 28.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/runn...
[1] - https://www.windowslatest.com/2016/02/26/project-astoria-por...
[2] - https://www.windowslatest.com/2016/02/09/project-islandwood-...
You can't even run Instagram on a low-end laptop.
- Seemingly relies on the Java virtual machine for simulation -- no support for native ARM binaries?
- Stores data inside the .app
Overall this repo has a lot of tells of a low quality LLM generated app. Many issues with data structuring, naming etc.
(Of course it's fine to use AI tools! We use them heavily ourselves. Just please don't use them to generate or edit text to be read by fellow humans on Hacker News itself.)
It's impossible to know for sure what was LLM generated or edited, but we have to rely on imperfect classifiers or else the site would be completely flooded by genai text, which is not what the community here wants to read, nor in the intended spirit of HN.