Suggestion

[Phil Hannent]

Good morning,

On 13 November 2013 07:49, David Woolley <forums at david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:
> On 13/11/13 06:49, Matthias Apitz wrote:
>
>>
>> But Android is based on Linux... Couldn't be ported the whole
>> infrastructure (gtk+, ...) to Android, as it works for me on
>> FreeBSD 10-CURRENT as well. An X11 server seems to exist for Android...
>
> You would need to build different binaries for each different processor and
> I'm fairly sure you would need a custom installer.  I suspect you would need
> to jail break the device first.
>
> The standard application infrastructure is based on Java applications but
> using a special, Android, environment, not the standard JRE or mobile
> equivalent.
I'd like to chime in to provide more detail;

1, Android has a native development kit so that C and C++ code can run
on Android, however yes you need a version for each processor
architecture, although generally ARM and x86 are going to cover the
market.
http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/ndk/index.html

2, Android doesn't use X11, it has its own custom graphics stack, at
its core is SurfaceFlinger, whilst X11 is available on Android, it's
not there by default.
http://source.android.com/devices/graphics.html

3, GTK has not been ported to Android, I have never seen any hint that
there is any intention to do so, a GUI would have to be written in
native Android calls or using the Qt toolkit.

4, A multi-protocol chat client is a very bad idea for a mobile
device. Think about all the wake-ups that happen with the client
chatting to the servers, your battery wouldn't last two hours. None of
the protocols were designed with low power and radio signals in mind,
this was one of the reasons that Google gave for developing Hangouts.
They centralised as much as possible and keep the chatter low on the
device. XMPP has some mobile extensions, however they are still in
experimental stage.

5, APK install files for Android can be installed from a download or
memory card, you just need to turn off verification in the developer
settings of your Android phone. However the Android App store probably
doesn't have the restrictions on GPL code that Apple has.

Regards
Phil