iAndroid, an Android Simulator for iPhone

I’ve never been a big fan of Android. I tried really hard to like Google’s mobile operating system but I never really made a deep connection with it. That was until a couple days ago, when I tried iAndroid, an Android simulator for jailbroken iPhone.

We’ve seen how to port Android to iOS before but it never really was a good set up. Things didn’t work well, supported devices were limited, and it just wasn’t pretty. Because iAndroid is not a port, but a simulator, it takes care of all these inconveniences to make the best of Android on your iPhone…

The first time you launch the application, it takes quite a while to load, but once operational, you will be taken to Android’s homescreen, with a big clock and a few icons at the bottom of the screen. Let’s go through all these apps one by one.

Settings: As you would expect on a simulator, the settings are pretty limited. You can change the web browser homepage, and change the wallpaper by using an image from your library. That’s about all there is to it.

Phone: When you launch the phone app, you will be presented a themed dialer, and when you hit the “call” button, it actually takes you to your iPhone’s phone app to complete the call. As soon as you hang up, you are automatically taken back to iAndroid.

Twitter: The Twitter app is actually a web app, the same version you can see by navigating to m.twitter.com from most smartphones. It seemed to load very quickly and worked quite well.

Facebook: Similar to the Twitter app, the Facebook app is the mobile version of the popular network embedded into the browser.

Camera: The sill camera worked well but unlike the iPhone’s camera, you can’t tap to focus, zoom, or even record a video.

Music: The music app is actually quite good. Again, it’s a web app and not a native app but if it wasn’t for the loading time, you couldn’t tell the difference. The music app works with music streaming service Myousic.me. While the search function didn’t work well for me, I could easily add songs from the “popular” section to a newly created playlist.

Paint: Paint is a very basic painting app. Almost useless to me but I’m sure kids would really appreciate it.

Browser: I don’t know if it’s just me but I found the browser to be particularly fast and well polished, although it lacked simple features such as bookmarking.

All apps: Just like AndroidLoader, a jailbreak app we covered a few days ago, this feature lets you see all your apps on one screen.

Search Widget: The Google search widget didn’t work very well for me. Even though the searching does work, the rendering of the search results was not optimized for the search window making it almost useless.

All in all, I have to admit I was positively surprised by iAndroid. It provides a well polished experience which is probably as close to what you’ll get without installing a heavy theme. And because it’s free and takes just a few seconds to download, there is no reason why you shouldn’t at least give it a try.

If there is any closet Android user among you, then rejoice because now is your time to come out.

Have you tried iAndroid? If so, what’s your take on it?