Exploring android development on iPad

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-07 09:30:05

After Apple has announced M1 for iPads people started speculating that we will see “pro” apps like Xcode announced for iPadOS during the upcoming WWDC. It got me thinking about the experience of building mobile apps on tablets, especially the workflow with emulators/simulators.

A couple of months ago, I came across the blog post of Joaquim Verges that showed how Projector could be used to enable remote IDE experience. Essentially, Projector allows running IntelliJ-based IDEs, such as Android Studio, on a remote machine with a lot of computing power. Since Projector draws UI in a browser, your favorite IDE becomes available anywhere, including iPads.

However, the mobile dev loop is incomplete without running the app in an emulator or a physical device. To my knowledge, there is no way of running an ADB server on iOS, killing off chances of connecting an Android phone directly to an iPad. Hosting emulators on iOS is also not possible without jailbreaking the device or sideloading applications. Instead of hosting it, we can run it alongside Android Studio on a VM and connect to it using a VNC client.

The setup used in this demo includes an iPad Air (2020) paired with a magic keyboard and trackpad (see the picture above). This combination works pretty well, especially with the cursor support in iPadOS.