June 10th in News by .

Brine – an iOS emulator for PlayBook (not yet available).

This morning a youtube link was floating around on Twitter showing several popular iOS games playing on the BlackBerry PlayBook. Personally, I was a bit skeptical at first, but it seem fairly likely that this video might actually be legit, and is being called Brine by its developer.

Apparently the developer (Bubble Wrap on Twitter) has created an iOS emulator (check his other YouTube video at the end of this post to see it running in Windows) and ported it to the PlayBook.

Sacha (one of the key minds behind Dingleberry, who has also developed/ported several Qt apps for PlayBook) confirmed that the developer behind the Brine project contacted him about it last year. For those of you more technically inclined, iOS apps are mostly compatible with the PlayBook, except for several libraries which are called on by iOS apps that are not in the PlayBook system. Brine works by wrapping these  missing iOS libraries into the app, and therefore allowing iOS apps to be played. Sacha also mentioned that Chris Wade (one of the other minds behind Dingleberry) has been working to port his own iOS emulator, iEmu, to the PlayBook.

When will this be available? I’m wondering the same thing myself. Personally I won’t be holding my breath, given Apple’s willingness to (ab)use the legal system to prevent competition, for the developer to make this app public. Businesscat2000 on CrackBerry, who first posted the video and says he is the developer, stated that

I would like to release to the public, but not sure if I will be able to.

So there you have it folks. It’s certainly possible, and if OpenSourceBB (or OSBBx) manages to get their hands on this we’ll certainly post more videos and pics, and maybe even try to get a public leak out ;)

As promised, here’s the other video:

Read more about this on the CrackBerry Forums at http://forums.crackberry.com/news-rumors-f40/real-fake-ios-apps-running-playbook-729197/ and http://forums.crackberry.com/playbook-apps-games-f243/ios-apps-running-playbook-video-729195/.

BlackBerry Addict threat-level Midnight. Hybrid builder, App/Theme Developer, Law Student, OSBB Co-Founder. My thoughts are your own.

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  • Shary Bhallu TC

    This looks promising but I am skeptical about it.

  • John

    I imagine that it’s perfectly do-able. As mentioned, Objective-C isn’t a million miles away from C/C++, so the idea of essentially emulating the libraries, if it has already been done on the desktop, isn’t that fantastic.

    As there are a number of emulators doing the rounds for the PlayBook, it just goes to show how powerful the platform is (and makes the mind boggle as to why some Android apps run so painfully).

  • Shary Bhallu TC

    John:

    If this app does what its supposed to (that is run iOS apps on a Playbook), it could do it seamlessly. Why? Because the hardware of iOS devices is identical to Playbook’s. The same processor is being used in Playbook, and a slightly lower variant of the GPU is being used.
    So I think that full blown emulation is not done, like its done in emulating Android apps on Playbook (Android devices has different Processor and GPU than Playbook’s). That is why the apps lag and hang.

    • Magnesus

      Some Android devices use the same processor and GPU as Playbook (Kindle Fire has almost identical hardware) – Android doesn’t care what processor, GPU or screen resolution the device has, it runs on everything – but most apps using NDK require ARM7. It lags and hangs because RIM did a bad job at porting Dalvik and didn’t implement NDK (which means most games won’t work).

  • MadGasser

    This will have to be an ‘underground’ app. 

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