Thanks to this new tool from Google developers can now easily port their Android apps into equivalent iOS code to allow them to run on Apple devices. The open sourced software will automatically convert all non UI Java code into Objective C, the code that is used native by iPhone, iPod and iPad. Developers would still need to manually re-code the UI using iOS sdk. Tom Hall, a Google Engineer wrote on the company developer blog, “J2ObjC enables Java code to be part of an iOS application’s build, as no editing of the generated files is necessary. The goal is to write an application’s non-UI code (such as data access, or application logic) in Java, which can then be shared by Android apps, web apps (using GWT), and iOS.”

The porting tool supports Java 6 and many of its features including, “exceptions, inner and anonymous classes, generic types, threads and reflection. JUnit test translation and execution is also supported.  J2ObjC can be used with most build tools, including Xcode and Make.”

Developers would still need to use Apple Mac Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) or higher with Xcode 4 or higher and JDK 1.6 installed, plus Apache Maven in order to use the new J2ObjC. Google say the software is between alpha and beta at the moment, so expect some bugs or other problems when using but it is doing a fairly good job.