3.9. On Porting Software to Android

In this chapter, you learned that Android has an application architecture radically different from the typical desktop application architecture and even quite different from most other systems on small devices, including the iOS operating system used in the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. If you attempt to port software by subverting the Android application architecture and force-fitting a conventional application architecture into an Android application, in order to facilitate a method-by-method transliteration from Objective-C, C++, or C#, odds are the effort will come to grief.

If you want to port existing software to Android, first take it apart: the data model, the user interface, and major noninteractive modules and libraries should be ported or reimplemented in the Android application model depending on how they fit. Android does have similarities to other modern managed application runtime environments and language systems. Once you understand Android in greater depth, you will be equipped to see architectural analogies with other platforms and make better implementation choices when porting.