Plans for MATLAB to Run Natively on Cell Phones?

I am aware of MATLAB Mobile, but are there any plans which would allow MATLAB to run natively on any cell phones? It seems that high end phones these days have more than adequate computational capacity and memory to support native MATLAB.

Thanks for your consideration.

Edit: Bump

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

MATLAB was formerly supported on multiple architectures but they got rid of that and now only support the Intel x86 and x64 line (and are doing away with the x86 support.) The architecture used by smartphones is variable but many use the ARM architecture such as the ARM Cortex-A A57 architecture implemented by Qualcomm in it's Snapdragon 810. The Samsung Galaxy S6 uses the Samsung Exynos 7 Octa 7420, with ARMv8-A instruction set, which is the same instruction set used by the Apple iPhone 5S.

It appears that there is a BLAS/LAPACK available for ARM, the ATLAS implementation. It is a self-tuning version that does a lot of testing to find the optimum machine code for the hardware that it is run on. But by the same token it is not generalized: to run it on a slightly different architecture requires rebuilding, a several day process.

It appears that IMSL belongs to Roguewave these days. I do see that it is available in source form from them, but I do not find evidence that it is being used on ARM -- which could be a simple "absence of evidence" case rather than "evidence of absence".

My answer is therefore a firm "If I actually knew anything about Mathwork's plans, then I am sure I would not be permitted to tell you", and my "armchair quarterbacking" says "No it probably isn't happening because that would be inconsistent with what product direction we can observe."

[Mark Stone]

Thanks Walter for the information. However, I am not accepting your answer because I am waiting for a response from someone at The MathWorks. I'll let them determine how much /what they are willing to say.

Nevertheless, the potential market seems large relative to the installed base of MATLAB, especially if priced "right". I can think of quite a few occasions in which in the middle of a meeting, as some new information came to light, I would have liked to whip out a pocket device and cranked out a ten thousand dimensional nonlinear optimization (or whatever) in MATLAB to put a matter to bed in real time, for instance before a stupid decision was made which would be much harder to reverse if I waited until I got back to my computer to perform calculations.

[Philip Borghesani]

I am curious about use case here. It seems like this use case is a perfect on for MATLAB mobile. To do this sort of calculation you probably need acces to data an code that exists on you computer or the cloud and there is no compelling reason to actually perform the calculation on your phone.

[Joseph Cheng]

If you are not looking for a community response then you better send an official request directly to Matlab. From my observation they don't monitor this consistently and those mathworks employees that do respond to questions are people who work on toolboxes.

[Walter Roberson]

Mathworks never gives official responses to questions about future directions in this forum. Never never. If you want I could poke someone from Mathworks to come over and give their standard "Ask your Sales Agent" semi-official answer, if the your lingering question is "Has anyone from Mathworks even read the question?"

In my observation, there are limited circumstances under which anything vaguely close to a product announcement has been made in this forum:

• A developer occasionally says "This bug has been fixed in the next release"
• A quite small number of times, a project lead has said "Yes, we are working on that, you can expect to see it in the next release!", with the timing of the remark being about two weeks before the release goes to beta testing -- something effectively ready to go. It was never clear that those remarks were within Mathwork's policies, but the harm was limited due to the proximity of the release of the feature
• Once I saw a project lead say explicitly that they were working on something for the release after the next. I'm pretty sure that was against policy.

Mathworks is rather closed-mouth about upcoming products. Most software companies are, as such announcements tend to lead people to wait to purchase later releases instead of purchasing in the presence.

The official word on future platform support can be found on their web site on this page

MATLAB for smartphone would need a completely new GUI. The MATLAB GUI was refreshed just a couple of years ago and that's when they came up with The Ribboned Wonder (ptew!). I'm not holding my breath waiting for a re-design.

(I've poked Mathworks for an official "Ask Sales" response)

[Joseph Cheng]

On the side note. If the decisions you are making are that important most phones have remote desktop software. Just remote into the computer and with the size of the phones these days its not to hard on the eyes.

[Mark Stone]

Regarding GUI: Just give me a command prompt like in the olden days of the pre-MathWorks Fortran-based MATLAB, complete with the lineprinter graphics, haha (o.k., maybe the DOS MATLAB).

[Joseph Cheng]

On the side note i remember hearing some people trying to port or convert GNU Octave to Android. I'm curious if it went anywhere.

[per isakson]

"GNU Octave to Android. I'm curious if it went anywhere." &nbsp https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.octave&hl=en

[Mark Stone]

The user may not always be in a position to remote into another computer. Heck, cell phones have a lot of storage capacity. Can have all my data and m files ready to go.

BTW, who needs MATLAB, when you can just get LAPACK (or better yet, LINPACK and EISPACK), and write driver routines, establish work arrays, etc., so you can find the eigenvalues of a 3 by 3 matrix.

[Andreas Goser]

I suggest accepting Walter's answer. Including the statement on the expectation of waiting for an "official MathWorks Answer".

[Walter Roberson]

I forgot to mention: sometimes a feature that is already out for official beta testing will get mentioned as nearly being available. Sometimes it is the beta testers doing the mentioning, but overall people are pretty good at staying within the NDA of beta testing.