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February 07, 2014

$5 Million is Raised for Native Cross-platform Android and iOS Games by Apportable

There seems to be a trend lately leading towards cross-platform apps. This seems to be especially true with respect to gaming apps. Usually, if you want to run the games in a native format, you will have two completely separate apps. You will have the Android version as well as the iOS version.

Apportable is a company whose platform converts iOS games to the Android platform automatically. It does this without any extensive changes to the original Objective-C or C++ code. The company is based out of San Francisco and was co-founded by Collin Jackson and Ian Fischer.

Jackson has quite a bit of experience as he used to build cross-platform software for Google and Cooliris. He also did some consulting work for Yahoo!, Betable and Microsoft and is now CEO at Apportable. Fischer became one of the co-founders while he was still working on his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. With take on hold for the moment, he took hold of the reins as Apportable’s CTO.

Yesterday, Apportable went through a new round of funding and raised $5 million. This funding will go towards financing a game development tool. This tool will be designed to allow developers the ability to take iOS games and get them to run on Android devices in a native format.

Being able to accomplish this is a twofold benefit. On the one hand, not only will it give developers the ability to create cross-platform games, it will also lower their costs by enabling them to build once and have the opportunity to publish on both mobile platforms.

On the flip side, Google should also see a benefit from this. It will help Google’s Android OS to more easily catch up with iOS in terms of getting equal time from game developers. This means that you can run these games in a speedy fashion without any compromises.

Just a couple of weeks ago on Jan. 21, Apportable released its second game building tool. It is called SpriteBuilder 1.0. This suite of tools is the first Objective-C cross-platform development suite. 

Objective-C is the programming language that Apple uses for its OS X and iOS operating systems. SpriteBuilder compiles code in Objective-C so that it runs on Android devices. This will save developers a great deal of time by converting instead of completely re-writing the code.

To show how popular the tool is, so far over 3,000 developers have downloaded SpriteBuilder. Apportable claims that SpriteBuilder is the only game development suite that enables a developer to run Objective-C code as a native application on Android. 

The $5 million in funding comes by way of Initialized Capital, Danhua Capita and Y Combinator. Angel investors include Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Natural Motion board member Mark Evans among others.

In an interview with GamesBeat, Jackson said “We get native bare-metal performance. Our mission is to provide the best platform for mobile apps. We have a very engineering-centric culture here and that has enabled us to build a very complex product.”

One of the investors, Ohanian said “This team has pulled off what most of us thought was impossible and I’m excited to see where it goes from here. With Apportable, any iOS developer can launch a native app on both platforms without the massive headaches and expenses normally associated with producing and distributing an app for both Apple and Android devices.”

According to Fischer, the time it takes to convert a 2D app from iOS to Android using SpriteBuilder 1.0 depends on the task at hand. In general, it takes about a month or so. The app has a free version, in addition to one that will cost $1,000. This obviously has more features. If that is not enough, there is also an enterprise version.





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