[Feature] add to IOS

[Nauris62]

I would love this on ios couse im a strictly iphone user

[NintyS]

If something is needed like remote MacOS to make builds I can help.

[ShootingKing-AM]

Thanks for your interest, but last time I checked, to develop iOS apps, we need to pay a lot of money to Apple Inc, to even start development. I personally don't have any iOS devices to test myself. Also I feel if you can afford an iOS device, you can easily invest in a standalone vr hardware (i guess?)

[NintyS]

No, developing app is free. Releasing it costs. Free version ( Apple Developer account) of app have 10 days to expire as far as I remember. Paid version have expire date up to one year. Only apps from App Store don't expire. Yes, if you can buy a brand new iPhone then you can buy a standalone device too, but from what I observed in my group most people buy a 2/3 years old iPhone or gets them ( used ) from family.

I have Apple devices and I can try to help develop iOS version ( but I'm not fluent in Switch or Objective-C )

[ShootingKing-AM]

IIRC there is a constraint of dev environment too right ? Like need to develop (run the IDE) on MacOS etc.
Even am not fluent in Swift, but once you start shouldn't be hard.

[NintyS]

Yea, you need to have Mac with MacOS which supports newest xCode version to program on newest iOS versions.

If you want I can try create iOS client in Qt & C++.

[ShootingKing-AM]

Maybe you can try researching software platforms which are available for both Android and iOS, instead of writing in native iOS (Swift etc.). I am aware that there are packages like flutter (etc.) which support multi-os with the same code base.

Maybe we can somehow integrate flutter (or other) with current code base. Its not a good idea to write the same code in two different languages, since it would be hard to maintain. That said, I myself don't know how to integrate flutter with ndk to port it to iOS, or even if it supports NDK.

The smartphone market is around 75% Android and 25% iOS IIRC. Hence, Supporting iOS would make us available for even more users. Any PRs are welcome though.

[NintyS]

Then Qt supposed to be good. I can create one code and build it for two or more platforms

[ShootingKing-AM]

I hope you are talking about mobile, never heard of Qt for android, but still try to reuse the existing codebase as much as possible.

If you are talking about server codebase, SteamVR API(which PVR uses) itself is not supported for linux/macos. In the latest commits to master branch, I made an integration with ALVR, which has some experimental linux support.

[NintyS]

Yes, I'm saying about mobile. You can write apps in Qt for iOS, Android And Ubuntu Touch ( but there you need to do a lots of work ). I will try to reuse the code.

[NintyS]

@ShootingKing-AM can you throw some informations about how to connect to ALVR server and if google cardboard is required?

[ShootingKing-AM]

ALVR has a library that can statically linked via Android NDK, that alvr_client_core can be used to communicate with ALVR Server. Yes Google carboard is required for its API.

ALVR code in NDK: https://github.com/PhoneVR-Developers/PhoneVR/blob/master/code/mobile/android/PhoneVR/app/src/main/cpp/alvr_main.cpp

Linking with ALVR_client_core: https://github.com/PhoneVR-Developers/PhoneVR/blob/master/code/mobile/android/PhoneVR/app/CMakeLists.txt

Makeing Alvr_client_core lib: https://github.com/PhoneVR-Developers/PhoneVR/blob/master/code/mobile/android/PhoneVR/prepare-alvr-deps.sh