Run iPhone SDK on iPad

Question

I was wondering if anyone knows if you can run the iPhone SDK on an iPad. Tried looking through apple.com, but didn't find anything useful...

I want to be able to develop -- from start to finish -- an iPhone app on the iPad and was wondering if that's possible...

Solution 1

That's unlikely (read: practically impossible). iPhone SDK and Xcode developer tools are designed to run on Mac OS X on Intel x86 processors. iPad's processor is a 1GHz ARM processor. It's a different architecture and is inadequate for running those tools effectively anyway. (This can change if Apple can and be willing to develop a version of said developer tools natively for iPhone OS with sufficient performance).

You can use a text editor on an iPad to write code but you are not likely to be able to compile, test, and debug it.

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By the way, in case the device can be jailbroken, you'd be able to run native gcc for iPhone OS to compile your app (as you can currently do with an iPhone/iPod touch too). You won't be able to use Apple's proprietary tools like Interface Builder but you'd be able to compile Objective-C sources and test and debug your app.

Solution 2

There is no reason for Apple to port the SDK to the iPad. There would be way more effort than value in this project.

As for testing on the device, this will work the same was as it does today on the iPhone. You will install a debug App on the device and debug through the cable inside XCode.

No different for the iPad than for the iPhone in this regard.

-t

Solution 3

The jailbreak developer saurik, who created Cydia, has already ported gcc to jailbroken iPhones and I'm sure it will be ported to jailbroken iPads.

Comments

[johannix]

That's unfortunate. Could've been a very convenient way to write those apps. Since you could test them out with the gestures and such...

[johannix]

I want to run the SDK itself.

[mmx]

@johannix: I agree. I personally plan to write a syntax highlighter for C# for iPad ;)

[user1066101]

Typing code on the "keyboard" simulation would be very, very difficult. You're not missing much.

[johannix]

They've got an external keyboard you could hook up. So I was imaging you'd use the real keyboard and then when you want to test it you'd just touch the screen... Although there isn't much screen real estate so it'd probably get very annoying.

[UnkwnTech]

+1 because your the first to point out that one can already test on the device.

[mmx]

@chpwn: There's no new "porting" to be done. iPad runs iPhone OS so the same thing should work. Jailbreak would suffice.

[Grant Paul]

Probably, but they broke the linker in 3.1 so who knows what else they can/will do.

[Aaron Ash]

that Mobile Xcode app idea might actually work well on an iPad.