[feature request] iOS support

[arooni]

• KOReader version: whichever
• Device: iphone x

i picked up an iphone recently just to see what the hype was about. i think i still prefer my pixel but it'd be super nice to have reading positions transfer from koreader on my paperwhite/android phone/android tablet to my iphone. seems like this has been brought up before on mobileread but the answer was support anytime soon wasn't likely.

i for one would love to see a built app in the ios app store (i'm not sure how else to install apps unless i jailbreak this phone), and would pay a reasonable price to not have to build with xcode or deal with dependencies. any one else have this interest?

many thanks!

[NiLuJe]

Magic 8 Ball says extremely unlikely.

(Can't execute dynamically generated code on iOS (that means no JIT at all), cross-compiling from another host than Darwin is extremely finicky, frontend would probably need to be in ObjC/Swift, .... That's a lot of reasons against it.).

Oh, and, of course, walled garden, I don't even think you can sideload stuff (how do iOS developpers deal with that? I don't know. XCode's emulator?).

And getting in the App Store is out of the question (if for nothing else than it requires a paid Apple Dev account for signing, which wouldn't even be the major point of contention).

[NiLuJe]

TL;DR: Apple can suck it.

[pazos]

@NiLuJe: you can sideload a couple (up to five I think) apps on your own device. Apps will work for 7 days on non-paid accounts and a whole year on paid dev accounts.

Porting KOReader would be possible for jailbroken devices only, where we can keep the scheme of running luajit and load (and interact) with shared libraries on demand.

[NiLuJe]

@pazos: Huh. I was just thinking/hoping that they might be doing some account shenanigans if the Apple ID was a dev one, thanks for the clarification ;).

Sidebar: is iOS jailbreaking still a thing?

[Frenzie]

(Can't execute dynamically generated code on iOS (that means no JIT at all)

Are you saying that https://love2d.org/ and Electron apps like Skype run without JIT on iOS?

[NiLuJe]

I actually have no idea how Electron apps would even work, since even Chrome/Firefox is just a pretty wrapper around Apple's WebKit on iOS, not actually Blink/Gecko ;).

(It's as if everything were forced to use Android's System WebView).

[Frenzie]

Many of those Electron apps quite literally work in the browser. Skype & Discord do, although Skype (web.skype.com) will refuse in Firefox. I seem to have made an incorrect assumption of some sort in any case, because Electron says the following:

Compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux, Electron apps build and run on three platforms.

So logically they use something very much like Electron, but not actually Electron. I think Discord might be using React Native, in which case Electron is merely React Native's way of doing desktop? Maybe Skype does the same. But if it has to depend on system WebKit on iOS I guess life is more annoying for those devs in all kinds of ways, but ultimately quite possibly better for us users. (Because of a certain degree of cross-browser compatibility; Blink and WebKit have diverged quite a bit.)

Edit: It says here they only use React Native for iOS, not on Android.
https://blog.discordapp.com/why-discord-is-sticking-with-react-native-ccc34be0d427

[arooni]

I would totally jailbreak my iphone for the ability to run koreader. No brainer. Sounds like the amount of dev work to get it working would be intense tho :\

[pazos]

Sidebar: is iOS jailbreaking still a thing?

Yup, IMO is the single thing between an iPad and a toyPad. The hability to have a proper file manager on device and mount arbitrary dirs on my linux machine when the device is unlocked is a must for my usage.

Also, you can fakesign your own apps and avoid the 7days restrictions on free accounts. Some apps are only available for jailbroken devices: mostly emulators and kodi.

[pazos]

Closing this one. Pull Requests are welcome!