<p>From popular games to file storage, tech companies will build their mobile applications for Apple's iOS platform first, then turn to the more complicated and fragmented Android ecosystem. It can be a complicated and painstaking process to rebuild a native app from scratch, as dating app HowAboutWe detailed last year.</p><p>The shortcut that has tempted app developers for years, however, has been the idea of software that could essentially convert your iOS code (called "Objective C") to the Java-based code largely used for Android, or a compiler that could take the building blocks of one and reassembles them automatically in the other. Such solutions are plentiful online, but the consensus: they're just not very good.</p><p>Apportable founders Collin Jackson and Ian Fischer (credit: Apportable)</p><p>That's where a startup called Apportable comes in, led by a Stanford PhD on leave from Carnegie Mellon's Silicon Valley campus, Collin Jackson. Jackson worked on web security at Google and has spent three years developing a solution that would actually work, preserving many of the features that are typically lost along the way as you switch to Android's different user experience (it has a back button, for starters).</p><p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2014/02/05/apportable-builds-ios-to-android-conversion/">Keep reading...</a></p>