> Run Android apps natively on Apple Silicon Macs. No emulator, no virtual machine, no Linux underneath.
God damnit Dario fix Claude already so that it stops using this sentence structure once and for all. Opus is so annoyingly recognisable that it has started to irk me badly lately
It's also not even correct. The diagram in README says the app is run on "built-in Java runtime" after it is converted, which, as I recall, is a virtual machine.
Precisely. Regis Philbin, Paris Hilton, Charles Barkley - they each have a pretty distinctive way of speaking and I have always actually enjoyed hearing each one's way of phrasing things. But it would quickly become hell if each week an additional 1% of the things we read was written exactly how Regis would phrase it.
(I purposely picked people with pretty specific speaking habits because yup, the Claude output is 100% that distinctive).
I said several months ago that bots like your coworker, personal assistant, search engine, and customer service are now all the same person. They also write all the blog posts and articles you read and scripts for YouTube videos.
Imagine if everything in the world you read was written by one author - and you didn't particularly like that author's writing style. Or even if you did like the author's style, it began to grate on you simply because there was no reprise from it.
Yes I got that, but afterwards it doesn't explain how until you get all the way down into the diagrams saying that it translates the code one-time. It's once again like no emulators, no virtual machine, no Android, no Linux kernel, no items, Fox only, final destination, whatever
"Run Android apps natively on Apple Silicon Macs. Uses translation instead of emulation."
No, slop generally doesn't get the point across efficiently.
It's hard to parse, it's grating, and in addition to the strange language you have to apply additional skepticism due to gross inaccuracy being more likely than in human-written text.
Cliches annoyed people before LLMs. There is a whole microgenre of essay ranting about the proliferation of various annoying cliches, bits of jargon, etc. the proliferation of Claude prose is simply rendering certain turns of phrase into annoying cliches, which people are reacting to in the normal way. Cliches also get the point across but nonetheless lots of people find them grating.
If you run a readability analysis on slop it scores very poorly. LLMs generally continue to be mediocre with the veneer of quality without context to guide them.
As impressive as this is, it's a wacky choice to store app data inside the .app file instead of Application Support. They justify it [1] as "nothing is scattered around your home folder," but that's a false choice.
Counter argument: it was a wacky choice for Apple to split the app and the “data” (Application Support). Yes multi-user and deduplication are concerns, but I would much rather have everything self-contained. Using that paradigm for Android apps (where dedup is barely a concern) is a relief
In practice, the Google Play Services dependencies and other walled-garden initiatives from Google will make this less useful than it could otherwise be. But still, this is really cool.
...what steam devices? Steam Deck and Machine? I work in video games(at one of the largest publishers - worked at other two in the last few years) - and while we usually do some testing on the steam deck it's literally just to see if the windows version runs well. Full on Linux porting effort like Larian did for BG3 is very very rare and extremely hard to justify.
In your experience, is "Steam Deck Verified" attractive enough to fix any issues you might find when testing? I've been immensely curious about whether it's moved the needle at all
And I hate it with a passion. Publishers have no problem taking money from Linux users, only to ignore Linux-related bug reports and tell people “it’s not supported.”
I really hope Steam will use its position soon to either let users get refunds when devs break their games or force the gaming industry to support the Linux users they’re making money from.
That's really what the (Deck/Machine/SteamOS) Verified program is for. Valve tests games out on those platforms and reports results back for everyone on the store page. Publishers have the control to explicitly mark it as unsupported too.
And the Frame Verified program, which is most of where I was going with this.
Lepton may most directly target Quest games, but it's not like it wouldn't also enable flatscreen titles running on AOSP, and it's not like Proton is limited to the use cases Valve intended either.
While it's better than nothing I don't think the Frame Verified results will be as useful to gauge compatibility for other devices because the Frame is quite underpowered. It's weaker than the Deck, has two much higher resolution displays, and tracking surely takes a chunk out of it too.
Steam is very upfront when you’re buying a windows game on mac. There’s a big banner saying it’s not for your OS and likely won’t work. There’s a compatibility icon for mac, and it’s filterable, for library and store, so you can get mac games. There’s an additional click-through screen on the store page with a checkbox. There’s a lot that’s filtered out!
The proton story pretends like you can run every windows game on steamos, verified or not. It’s quite different and tbh a little dishonest. I wonder how much of it is avoidance of alert fatigue (because many many unverified games do work) and how much if it is trying to sell users on steamos.
Well, just remember that Steam doesn't actually know where you intend to play the game. I buy most of my Steam games on my phone, and obviously there's no point in steam warning me that the game will not run on android.
> Full on Linux porting effort like Larian did for BG3 is very very rare and extremely hard to justify
Given the zeitgeist, how realistic are the calls to “just get AI to do it”? I’ve been rattled by just how good some one-shot (or otherwise low-human-effort) Claude ports of some games are (and I don’t mean “decomps”, but instead where an existing open-source and already-cross-platform codebase is ported over to new targets like WASM+Canvas, like C&C Generals: the AI-bros are in full-force posting demos of their new ports on a nearly daily basis - so if it’s as easy as these people say, why aren’t we seeing it from the major publishers?
> why aren’t we seeing it from the major publishers?
Models are just recently capable of reliably doing this type of deeper work, which is why you're only seeing it now. There hasn't really been enough time to see it. And still, why? Modern gaming on Linux is almost always on accident, with the devs targeting windows, with no thoughts of Linux at all. Seems like it would make more sense to point the AI at wine, to make linux run Windows better.
I guess, in practice this can also be likely be made to run google services, the same as they can run on custom ROMs. And it already lists Aurora store as a solution.
So it's definitely something for more tinkerer people, but still quite cool.
What? Niantic (Google) admitted they were training spatial AI models. I have not seen evidence that the data was a "foreign intelligence-gathering operation" and I would welcome a source.
Soo many more things than banking apps at this point. Things as normal as looking at train schedules, grocery store catalogues, ordering a taxi... sometimes have SafetyNet DRM.
When you publish apps on Google Play, the Play Developer Console even nags you to use harder obfuscation and implement Google's DRM to, allegedly, protect yourself and your users.
Can the EU finally make this shit illegal? Oh wait, they're pusing for mandatory DRM too... Fuck.
Fortunately, there are (at least for now) many, many banks to choose from, and you can tell the app-only ones to suck it. There's also almost no switching cost. The last time I changed banks, it was mostly done in an afternoon.
I'm no expert on the matter, but I've developed and published multiple Android apps to the Play Store. Some of those apps have needed Google Play Services APIs. Google has also been actively making moves to lock down control and offering things like the Play Integrity API that some apps use.
By your phrasing, it sounds like you're implying my understanding is wrong somehow. If so, what am I missing?
I'm not the commenter but this is my experience in about 10% or so of cases. I've been running a network audit of baby tracking apps and the information they phone home with (results are pretty Orwellian so far) and a few of the apps have been virtually impossible to emulate without an active Google Play account that is verified against Google's servers.
Handy for Minecraft players on Mac: windows players may be on Java or on bedrock versions, but mobile and console players are all only on bedrock. Being able to run the Android version on Mac means I can play with local console players or join a bedrock realm.
(There are compatibility workarounds if you run your own server but I don’t want the headache of doing so).
Perhaps one day Mojang will enable Macos users to run the iPad (bedrock) version of Minecraft as well..
Funnily, specifically for Minecraft Bedrock, there's such a project (implementing a limited/specialized compatibility layer) targeting Linux/macOS for few years now.
I have tried that project a couple years ago! My son moved on to mostly enjoying modded Java Edition but it was useful in a pinch, though it shared a few annoying characteristics that reminded me of my previous solution, playing on an Xbox One X with mouse and keyboard attached. Namely, that it wasn't as smooth as it is on a PC to bring up the chat and quickly type commands, requiring extra mouse clicks IIRC.
I don't think anything to do with Intel matters, as the existing Mac solution they provide is just running Java Edition which already runs natively on ARM anyway.
Honestly I'm confused why they haven't brought Bedrock to Mac yet, as MS makes Mac versions of tons of stuff, from Edge to Copilot to Office; and Minecraft Bedrock Edition not only sells for money but has recurring in-app-purchase revenue, and Macs seem to be selling well.
Yeah, Apple went 90% of the way there, but decided it was up to the developer.
I get it, because if you're a developer you don't want to be deluged with support requests from a platform that you don't care about.
But also, it feels more like a favor to big corporate interests who are probably worried about "security" in the sense that macOS is only 95% locked down. It's still possible to have true root if you disable a few things, and it probably makes the kind of companies who make apps that refuse to run on a jailbroken device worry.
When Apple pulls the last plug on letting us mere users actually own our computers and moves the macOS to the iOS model where Apple will decide what programs you can run, it will probably come with the small benefit that all iOS apps will be required to be installable on Mac.
They absolutely can, you can download and run virtually every app off the iOS app store on a mac, and it runs in an emulator which is entirely native, no virtualization involved. Pretty sure it doesn't even need XCode. Mojang is likely actively detecting and locking out the emulator from the release version of the app.
The apps are downloaded from the macOS app store by searching, then clicking the "iPhone and iPad Apps" tab. Most of them read "not verified for macOS" but let you install them anyway, so it's not just apps specifically enabling support for macOS launching them. Minecraft does not show up on that tab though, so it would seem that the listing is something that can be withdrawn.
And it's probably using something similar to the Simulator, but likely not the simulator itself. It's been a really long time since I launched any iPad apps on my mac, so I did get get a lot of the details wrong, sorry.
Android has never used the JVM: it used to translate Java bytecode to its Dalvik VM format, called DEX, and executed that. Nowadays, all Android apps are compiled to native code ahead of time, though still using DEX as an intermediate representation in the .apk, and compiling on the device itself before first load.
Yep, it runs on the JVM by basically doing the reverse of Dalvik, translating the DEX back into JVM bytecode, and they supply Java implementations of the Android APIs.
https://github.com/kksimp/Mac.apk/wiki/How-Mac.apk-Works has all the interesting details.
Meanwhile I ignore most of the posts here that are Apple-related, this one was able to draw my attention. Checked the 'how it works' page and was impressed how easily Claude made the 32-to-64 bit ARM translator for you. We need more effort of this kind for the x86 ecosystem, generated or not, but the mobile-app-everything culture becomes really annoying and needs to be fought this way.
Also it's way worse than that, since most things are written in React Native or some other cross-platform framework, then that's wrapped in a mobile app, then you try to access a website to do some trivial task that the Web is great at (Place a takeout order or pay $6 for parking) and are told to download a 500MB "App"... and create an account... 'we sent a code to your email, go check it...' 'Ask App not to track?' 'Allow location?' etc)
Have you looked into the Shortcuts app automations, to see whether you can forward incoming SMS to Gmail using that?
Just a couple of days ago, I deleted a shortcut/automation to forward messages to email which I had sitting around for ages. I had disabled it, but I don't remember if I disabled it because didn't need it, or I never got it working. I know WhatsApp was harder.
Free VPN? Does ProtonVPN do what you need?
Edit: By the way, I agree about wanting Android apps. I can't remember what I feel like I'm missing now - I must have learned to live without them.
I bet a lot of people have been doing this conversion work independently on one-off AI-assisted personal projects this year. But now someone made a thing so all those tokens (and time) can be saved!
Now for someone to make another one of these converters for webapps to become Mac apps. That would be nice, too. =) (Now I wonder if it has already been done…?)
>Now for someone to make another one of these converters for webapps to become Mac apps. That would be nice, too. =) (Now I wonder if it has already been done…?)
Recently I've seen these game mods where people combine the game engines of two unrelated games (eg, minecraft and grand theft auto) and end up with a play-able and fun product.
I wonder how many areas of computing are about to be transformed by the class of things that used to be impossible because the engineering needed to make it happen has just gone from enterprise level to "claude please do this" level.
You're probably better off using a patched android emulator image, which has better fidelity. And all of this is ignoring both would trip any app that has anti-tamper protections, neither is foolproof.
Yeah, Microsoft tried 'both ways' to expand their quite small Windows Phone applications catalogue. And while Project Astoria [1] aimed at bringing Android apps, Project Islandwood was about easing porting of iOS applications [2]. Then MS decided that Windows Phone platform has no future.
Still wish Windows Phone was around. Having basically no apps was a positive and at least some people at Microsoft understood it when they advertised WP as being for people who didn't want to use their phones all the time.
Being able to say "Oh sorry I can't run that I have a Windows Phone" was fantastic, and if like 10-15% of the young adult population could say that, random services and venues would not be able expect you to install unwanted mobile apps.
And yet somehow Microsoft / Mojang don't see fit to enable Minecraft Bedrock for iPads on Macs. Pretty frustrating for cross-platform play. It's pretty funny that Bluestacks / Mac.apk work just fine for playing the Android Bedrock version on a Mac when the iOS app is right there.
obviously vibe-coded and therefore unlikely to be stable. but still good that this exists, because someone will probably take this and un-shittify (or you know, actually read) the code
I saw a hint of machine code recompilation in the libraries list (like capstone), but couldn't find enough to verify if recompilation means more than just extracting the dalvik stuff and reformatting it to run on a normal JVM
(Of course it's fine to use AI tools! We use them heavily ourselves. Just please don't use them to generate or edit text to be read by fellow humans on Hacker News itself.)
It's impossible to know for sure what was LLM generated or edited, but we have to rely on imperfect classifiers or else the site would be completely flooded by genai text, which is not what the community here wants to read, nor in the intended spirit of HN.
It’s a neat accomplishment. And it was worth doing for that alone. Absolutely hacker worthy.
But as someone with an Apple Silicon Mac, I can run iOS apps on my computer if the developer has allowed it and I don’t. I’ve never come up with an actual need. It turns out it’s never really a problem for me.
The few things I use a lot on my phone already have desktop equivalents. The long tail stuff tends to be stuffed that I wouldn’t really use from my computer anyway. Like locking my car or using a banking app. One I don’t need, the other is already covered by the website.
So I’m wondering if anyone has found a strong use for this kind of tools.
What about that chinese cat feeder whose app requires a suspicious number of permissions, and requires max version of android 2 versions behind the current one?
Or maybe your security camera has a "free" plan without motion detection, and you just keep the app running with a screen grab on top to do your own AI motion detection.
Or my eero router, which doesn't have a web interface... etc etc.
There's a million cheap hardware gadgets that are going to lose sw support at some time, and stop being functional. This will help a lot with that.
Then I can probably vibecode a native reverse-engineered solution to both those specific problems in less effort than it took to vibecode an Android translator for Mac.
>What about that chinese cat feeder whose app requires a suspicious number of permissions, and requires max version of android 2 versions behind the current one?
Did you read the project page? This runs with no sandbox. If you want to run shady chinese apps, you should be running it in android emulator (a VM), not this translation layer.
As someone who develops iOS and Android apps, I run production, store-installed variants on my Mac all the time for iOS apps. It's pretty nice and would be cool if I could do the same for Android.
God damnit Dario fix Claude already so that it stops using this sentence structure once and for all. Opus is so annoyingly recognisable that it has started to irk me badly lately
It's not just overused — it's a cliche now.
This one is fine.
Would they be grating to them in the pre-LLM days?
(I purposely picked people with pretty specific speaking habits because yup, the Claude output is 100% that distinctive).
No, same way "synergy" wasn't grating before every middle manager started saying it.
That's the world we are shifting to.
No, slop generally doesn't get the point across efficiently.
It's hard to parse, it's grating, and in addition to the strange language you have to apply additional skepticism due to gross inaccuracy being more likely than in human-written text.
[1] https://github.com/kksimp/Mac.apk/wiki/How-Apps-Are-Installe...
I really hope Steam will use its position soon to either let users get refunds when devs break their games or force the gaming industry to support the Linux users they’re making money from.
Lepton may most directly target Quest games, but it's not like it wouldn't also enable flatscreen titles running on AOSP, and it's not like Proton is limited to the use cases Valve intended either.
The proton story pretends like you can run every windows game on steamos, verified or not. It’s quite different and tbh a little dishonest. I wonder how much of it is avoidance of alert fatigue (because many many unverified games do work) and how much if it is trying to sell users on steamos.
Given the zeitgeist, how realistic are the calls to “just get AI to do it”? I’ve been rattled by just how good some one-shot (or otherwise low-human-effort) Claude ports of some games are (and I don’t mean “decomps”, but instead where an existing open-source and already-cross-platform codebase is ported over to new targets like WASM+Canvas, like C&C Generals: the AI-bros are in full-force posting demos of their new ports on a nearly daily basis - so if it’s as easy as these people say, why aren’t we seeing it from the major publishers?
Models are just recently capable of reliably doing this type of deeper work, which is why you're only seeing it now. There hasn't really been enough time to see it. And still, why? Modern gaming on Linux is almost always on accident, with the devs targeting windows, with no thoughts of Linux at all. Seems like it would make more sense to point the AI at wine, to make linux run Windows better.
So it's definitely something for more tinkerer people, but still quite cool.
When you publish apps on Google Play, the Play Developer Console even nags you to use harder obfuscation and implement Google's DRM to, allegedly, protect yourself and your users.
Can the EU finally make this shit illegal? Oh wait, they're pusing for mandatory DRM too... Fuck.
https://github.com/microg/GmsCore
By your phrasing, it sounds like you're implying my understanding is wrong somehow. If so, what am I missing?
(There are compatibility workarounds if you run your own server but I don’t want the headache of doing so).
Perhaps one day Mojang will enable Macos users to run the iPad (bedrock) version of Minecraft as well..
I predict they will, once macOS drops intel support in macOS 28.
Honestly I'm confused why they haven't brought Bedrock to Mac yet, as MS makes Mac versions of tons of stuff, from Edge to Copilot to Office; and Minecraft Bedrock Edition not only sells for money but has recurring in-app-purchase revenue, and Macs seem to be selling well.
I get it, because if you're a developer you don't want to be deluged with support requests from a platform that you don't care about.
But also, it feels more like a favor to big corporate interests who are probably worried about "security" in the sense that macOS is only 95% locked down. It's still possible to have true root if you disable a few things, and it probably makes the kind of companies who make apps that refuse to run on a jailbroken device worry.
When Apple pulls the last plug on letting us mere users actually own our computers and moves the macOS to the iOS model where Apple will decide what programs you can run, it will probably come with the small benefit that all iOS apps will be required to be installable on Mac.
And it's probably using something similar to the Simulator, but likely not the simulator itself. It's been a really long time since I launched any iPad apps on my mac, so I did get get a lot of the details wrong, sorry.
My collection of pre-AI technical books and manuals is becoming increasingly valuable to me.
Android apps are usually written in Kotlin or Java, so this solution does not depend on the JVM?
Also it's way worse than that, since most things are written in React Native or some other cross-platform framework, then that's wrapped in a mobile app, then you try to access a website to do some trivial task that the Web is great at (Place a takeout order or pay $6 for parking) and are told to download a 500MB "App"... and create an account... 'we sent a code to your email, go check it...' 'Ask App not to track?' 'Allow location?' etc)
Just a couple of days ago, I deleted a shortcut/automation to forward messages to email which I had sitting around for ages. I had disabled it, but I don't remember if I disabled it because didn't need it, or I never got it working. I know WhatsApp was harder.
Free VPN? Does ProtonVPN do what you need?
Edit: By the way, I agree about wanting Android apps. I can't remember what I feel like I'm missing now - I must have learned to live without them.
Now for someone to make another one of these converters for webapps to become Mac apps. That would be nice, too. =) (Now I wonder if it has already been done…?)
Yeah, it's called a web browser.
I wonder how many areas of computing are about to be transformed by the class of things that used to be impossible because the engineering needed to make it happen has just gone from enterprise level to "claude please do this" level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....
[1] - https://www.windowslatest.com/2016/02/26/project-astoria-por...
[2] - https://www.windowslatest.com/2016/02/09/project-islandwood-...
Being able to say "Oh sorry I can't run that I have a Windows Phone" was fantastic, and if like 10-15% of the young adult population could say that, random services and venues would not be able expect you to install unwanted mobile apps.
You can't even run Instagram on a low-end laptop.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/runn...
- Seemingly relies on the Java virtual machine for simulation -- no support for native ARM binaries?
- Stores data inside the .app
Overall this repo has a lot of tells of a low quality LLM generated app. Many issues with data structuring, naming etc.
(Of course it's fine to use AI tools! We use them heavily ourselves. Just please don't use them to generate or edit text to be read by fellow humans on Hacker News itself.)
It's impossible to know for sure what was LLM generated or edited, but we have to rely on imperfect classifiers or else the site would be completely flooded by genai text, which is not what the community here wants to read, nor in the intended spirit of HN.
It’s a neat accomplishment. And it was worth doing for that alone. Absolutely hacker worthy.
But as someone with an Apple Silicon Mac, I can run iOS apps on my computer if the developer has allowed it and I don’t. I’ve never come up with an actual need. It turns out it’s never really a problem for me.
The few things I use a lot on my phone already have desktop equivalents. The long tail stuff tends to be stuffed that I wouldn’t really use from my computer anyway. Like locking my car or using a banking app. One I don’t need, the other is already covered by the website.
So I’m wondering if anyone has found a strong use for this kind of tools.
Or maybe your security camera has a "free" plan without motion detection, and you just keep the app running with a screen grab on top to do your own AI motion detection.
Or my eero router, which doesn't have a web interface... etc etc.
There's a million cheap hardware gadgets that are going to lose sw support at some time, and stop being functional. This will help a lot with that.
Did you read the project page? This runs with no sandbox. If you want to run shady chinese apps, you should be running it in android emulator (a VM), not this translation layer.
android emulator?
I hate typing on non-physical keyboards.