In the world of smartphones in this day and age, apps are everything. Sure, companies could put forth devices with amazing hardware specifications, but if there is lack of support for apps then your fancy, souped up smartphone is pretty much only good for phone calls, text messages and surfing the web. The amount of apps available for both iOS and Android is probably one of the reasons that both platforms are currently dominating the market, but it looks like OpenMobile is attempting to change that with their Applications Compatibility Layer (ACL).When developing an app, developers will have to figure out how to get their app from one platform onto the other while retaining a similar experience, and they also need to decide if porting the app over to another platform is worth the time and effort, so while developing for iOS and Android seems like the most profitable at the moment, that means that other platforms like MeeGo, Bada, Symbian and Blackberry OS may be left out of the loop.
OpenMobile’s ACL is looking to solve that problem, and in demonstration they have shown that MeeGo users will be able to run Android applications on their devices and is virtually indistinguishable from native apps, or so they’re claiming. Unfortunately ACL does not work with Android Market but it works with 3rd party app stores, like Amazon’s Appstore for Android. Check out the video below for a demonstration of ACL in action.