As an academic work this would fairly clearly fall under a fair use defense, but I wonder how the recent Oracle / Java copyright API decision would affect any potential further development / distribution / commercialization of something like this. It seems at very least it would have a huge chilling effect on anybody who might otherwise have thought to attempt it.
Even without the Oracle ruling, any attempt to commercialize something like this would get shutdown because of how it decrypts IPA files. Not to mention Apple's terms of service are very clear that iOS apps cannot be distributed outside of the App Store (the enterprise deployment "store" option being the one exception, and companies pay for that privilege and have to comply with specific guidelines around that).
It's not just the apps themselves. In its current state, the program in the paper replaces only the kernel interface and some user libraries (OpenGL); all the rest of the core Apple frameworks are copied from iOS. In theory, a Wine-like project could attempt to reimplement all of these frameworks, which is where the Oracle ruling comes in...
> In theory, a Wine-like project could attempt to reimplement all of these frameworks
You mean like the Google Ventures-backed Apportable[0]? It's already delivered 3 of the top 10 games on Android, and I'm currently using it to port a "normal" social network app from iOS to Android (using the development version which re-implements Core Animation on top of OpenGL ES 2).
And getting back to the Oracle ruling I think the fair-use defence for something like this aimed at a compatible implementation would be stronger than Google's because they were trying to fork the platform and avoid the available Java licensing offers.
Base the company in Germany, problem solved. Here it is legal to reverse engineer and reimplement stuff, as long as you're doing it to obtain compatibility with other apps/platforms.
Stated in such a general way, this is not true. It's just the case that some contractual preventions of reverse engineering might be invalid. But the moment you distribute something, patent laws can become a big problem.
