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‘Silver’ enables developers to use Swift to write Android and Windows Phone apps

RemObjects is using its experience with compilers to allow developers to use Apple’s Swift coding language for Android development. Previously, the company did something similar for C# and now the company is tackling Swift. Silver allows app makers to write in the Swift language (which is still in its infancy, really) but code against the API’s and frameworks of non-Apple platforms.

The software does not port Cocoa Touch over to Android, so it doesn’t help with write-once-run-anywhere dreams some people may have, but it does allow a development team to use just one language to write natively for both iOS and Android. The team have also made it work with .NET, so Windows Phone apps could also be written in Swift too, using the IDE (Visual Studio) Windows developers already use. For small teams, something like Silver makes the thought of writing for non-Apple systems much less daunting.

Silver will be available as a public preview soon. You can sign up on RemObjects’ website.

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Comments

  1. antrikshy - 10 years ago

    I wonder if this conflicts with Apple’s policies somewhere.

    • Jonny - 10 years ago

      I’m pretty sure even asking that question is probably a violation of one of their policies :)

    • luckydcxx - 10 years ago

      i’m pretty sure it does

    • degraevesofie - 10 years ago

      No, as long as it’s a clean-room implementation, there is no problem with this. Just like third-party clean-room implementations of Java (like IBM’s or EDG’s) are not a problem.

  2. This is great! Looks like it’s all comes down to Android and Windows, (unless Apple makes a come back with another release of an over price phone.) I don’t think Apple is going to be able to compete very well, now that it’s way easier and cheaper to develop android and windows apps. Here is something that I wrote a while back on. I’m thinking android is the current leader of the mobile industry. http://androiddevempire.blogspot.com

  3. Computer_Whiz123 - 10 years ago

    On my god YES! This is like my holy grail of app development!

  4. Ian Goss - 10 years ago

    The plural of IDE would be IDEs.

Author

Avatar for Benjamin Mayo Benjamin Mayo

Benjamin develops iOS apps professionally and covers Apple news and rumors for 9to5Mac. Listen to Benjamin, every week, on the Happy Hour podcast. Check out his personal blog. Message Benjamin over email or Twitter.


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