Alien Dalvik Expands The Android Platform To Other Platforms - The UpStream

Alien Dalvik Expands The Android Platform To Other Platforms

posted Wednesday Feb 9, 2011 by Jon Wurm

Alien Dalvik Expands The Android Platform To Other Platforms

Early this week Google unveiled the web-based Android Market, which allowed Android users a more comprehensive app marketplace experience and helped bridge the gap between the web and mobile applications. The web isn't the only other platform Android has its eye on either. Having just dethroned Symbian as the leading mobile OS worldwide that might not be so surprising, but something very surprising is that Google isn't behind the expansion this time.

To find out who is and what they have planned for Android, hit the break.

A leading mobile app and software company based in Zurich called Myriad will be attending Mobile World Congress this month and are expected to demonstrate a virtual machine (VM) named "Alien Dalvik Virtual Machine solution" which should allow Android apps to run on non-Android devices.

Dalvik is the VM that Google uses to run all their apps on inside the Android OS. The reasons for running apps on a VM inside an OS is simple. A VM creates a reverse safe room that will protect the other parts of the OS should an app crash, creating stability in the system. Myriad is essentially trying to transplant the safe room into other operating systems which is much harder than it sounds.

They have been able to successfully run Alien Dalvik on a Nokia N900 MeeGo device and the humor of running a VM from the very OS that took Nokia's Symbian from the top spot on a Nokia device is not lost on me. I'm hoping that they will also target WebOS in the near future since they tend to suffer from a lack of applications. Something I am curious about is what kind of effect this might have on the fragmentation issues associated with Android. What do you guys think?

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