iPad Musescore?

• May 14, 2024 - 00:22

If Musescore is open source, what's stopping people from porting it into iOS?

Comments

• May 14, 2024 - 04:37

Nothing. Go for it! I suspect you'll find it more complicated than you think. But if you pull it off, you'll be highly thought of in the MuS world.

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• May 14, 2024 - 15:14

I'm not claiming it would be an easy thing to do. But considering it's open source at it's been around for many years, I'm surprised nobody pulled it off yet. I am very curious as to what are the main challenges for porting it to iOS. I, like many users, have zero software development experience (I can barely code).

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• May 14, 2024 - 17:02

A good question. Would a port to iOS/Android have to remain open source or could it become a closed source, for-profit venture? If the former then that could be a disincentive to investing a lot of time into development.

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• May 15, 2024 - 00:29

musescore (the software - not the score website) is under GPL license.
meaning: if someone ported musescore to mobile and charged for it, they would have legal problems.

if they used musescore's code as a base, ported and charged for it under a different name, they would also be in trouble, because it would be a derivative (and derivatives are covered under GPL).

in other words: it's not possible to monetize musescore (the software) on other operating systems, as far as I know.

but still doesn't explain why ANYONE didn't port it. big open source projects like musescore always have people who do that kind of stuff, most of the time just for fun.
considering musescore has existed for more than a decade and no one has done it yet, that must mean the technical challenges of porting it to something other than windows or macos must be really tough.

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• May 15, 2024 - 01:27

"that must mean the technical challenges of porting it to something other than windows or macos must be really tough"

I'm extremely skeptical of this statement. It's going to be approximately equal in difficulty to port the application to any other OS. That is, it's going to be approximately as hard to port from Windows to Mac as from Linux to iOS. I'm'a guess that a more likely explanation is that no one has had enough interest in doing it.

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• May 15, 2024 - 01:16

Apple have several hoops you need to jump though in order to develop an app for iOS. No one seems to be sufficiently acrobatically inclined to want to do this (to date).

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• May 15, 2024 - 19:49

Perhaps a better solution would be a web app version as this could be used by any device with a web browser, which would mean most common OSes. There would be no Apple/Google barriers. This looks feasible because websites like https://flat.io/ already do this.

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