How to Convert an Android App to an iOS App (and Vice Versa)

Even though there are almost 3 times fewer iOS users than the ones with Android, iOS users generate $9B more revenue for app owners. When porting an app to Android, you significantly expand your potential audience, but by building an iOS app, you enter a market of customers who tend to pay more.

In fact, scaling gradually is a common practice among current market leaders:

• Instagram was launched on iOS in 2010 and only 4 years later converted to an Android app.
• A similar story happened with Airbnb. There was a 14-months time gap between releasing the iOS version of the Airbnb app and the launching of the Android one.
• Clubhouse started with being for iOS users only, but now it’s also accessible over Google Play Store.

In this article, we’ll answer some questions you might have on how to perform the porting as flawlessly as possible, and give you a couple of tech insights, and share a way to deliver an app for both OSs with almost the same codebase!

❓ FAQ on Porting iOS App to Android (and Vice Versa)

Before we go into detail on the OS differences when it comes to porting an app from one system to another, it’s essential to clear some things up.

Here, we draw on the experience of the most widespread use cases. Meaning that you could possibly benefit from other approaches. If you’d like to get our view on your specific use case, feel free to contact us!

What Are the Converting Options? 🔄

To begin with, let’s tackle this question: Are there any converters where you can paste your source code, press a button, and get a code for another operating system?
Unfortunately, no. Platforms’ features and differences make it impossible to convert an iOS app to Android with just a few taps. The options aren’t that diverse when it comes to building an app for another OS — it’s developing it from scratch.

You could reuse certain parts of the code in some cases and we’ll cover them as well, but it would be a separate development process for the most part.

Another great thing to do is building an app with basic functionality and a couple of brand details so users memorize it. Such a strategy helps you optimize costs and reduce development time when you launch an app for the first time.

The thing is that it might not be reasonable to allocate a lot of resources to build a high-tech app with a lot of 3rd-party integrations if you’re not even sure that the new market will be actively using it.

✅ Top Things to Pay Attention to When Building an iOS↔️Android App

When porting an iOS to Android app, it’s important to keep aspects such as operating system versions or navigational patterns differences in mind.

In this section, we’ll talk about the main differences in various development aspects and how to handle them so that the porting would be as smooth as possible.

# 1: OS Versions 🔒

First, we’d like to talk about OS versions. It often happens that mobile users don’t update their devices to the latest OS for whatever reason. We can’t really do anything to change the situation, yet, we definitely should make sure that both apps work well on all operating systems that are actively used now.

If you need to port an Android app to iOS, it’s not a big deal since Apple doesn’t update their devices that often. Plus, most of the users tend to have one of the latest iOS versions. As for now, almost 92% of users have iOS 14.

This means that adjusting an app to iOS 14 and its subversions like 14.6 (might not be necessary if no drastic changes aren’t applied) and you’ll have the biggest part of users satisfied.

So that each part of the product is tested enough, you should expect to spend about 30% of the whole development time on testing.

🚀 How React Native Can Be Useful In Building an App for 2 OS

All the major mobile OSs have their own software development kits which are also known as SDKs. Moreover, SDKs have preferred languages that we’ve already mentioned before (Swift and Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android). To build a native mobile app, developers use these programming languages and their official SDKs.

Yet, there are cross-platform frameworks that allow you to use a single codebase to create an app for several platforms at once. We at Stormotion deliver extensive React Native development services that perfectly fits for developing cross-platform products. It can make it possible to reuse 70-80% of the code.

You can check our Civocracy or Pocket Promoter case studies. We’ve built these apps using React Native.

💡 Takeaways

Porting an app from iOS to Android or vice versa is still a challenging process. Yet, the right approach and well-functioning app on one of the operating systems make it significantly easier and faster.

Let’s briefly summarize the main ideas of this article:

1. You can’t convert an Android app to an iOS app in one click.
2. For this purpose, you need to develop the second app separately or initially write both of them using the cross-platform framework. This will take less time and effort than building an application from scratch.
3. Yet, building an app with an existing well-functioning one is easier and faster.
4. It’s important to make sure that navigational patterns are 100% adjusted to each OS.
5. React Native is a great framework for cross-platform development. So, if you’d like to update your existing product as well, consider using this framework.

One of the best things you can do is finding a reliable mobile development agency or development team and have them as your tech partner. An experienced team usually knows how to work with both platforms so the iOS to Android or vice versa migration isn’t a big deal. They can also provide you with the post-release support of your both applications.

If you need any help with porting your app to one of the Operating Systems or have any questions, feel free to contact us. We would be happy to help you!