R on the iPhone

R Twitterer ech0chrome reports that (s)he has successfully installed R on an iPhone. I haven't tried it myself, since it requires jailbreaking the iPhone, but full instructions have been posted to the R Wiki. It seems that once you have Debian installed on the iPhone, it's simply a matter of installing the required Debian packages. Seems like a neat hack, but I'm not sure how productive I'd be typing R code on that small keyboard, even with the complete 5-row keyboard available on jailbroken iPhones. Now, if you could run R on the iPad (early reports of it being hacked are coming in already), that might be another story.

Comments

[Ken Williams]

I don't think the post means you have to install Debian, it just means you can use the Debian package management system to install R as a regular iPhone app.

[fxj]

is there a version of R on android? that should even be easier to install because there is no need to jailbreak

[Mikhail Popov]

I'm still waiting for R on Android (Linux).

Portable statistics on my G1? Yes please!

[Sherri]

If we can get R and Latex on the iPad, consider me already in line.

[Adam Hyland]

I imagine that even if you can't get R running on the iPad without jail breaking it, you could run a pretty cool front end. But if running R on ipad is as simple as jailbreaking it and running Linux, that might be pretty cool. I doubt it will handle medium/medium-large datasets very well. I opened a csv with about 10,000 elements and it definitely chugged while navigating the spreadsheet, to say nothing of running operations over loops! :)

[Michal Blazejczyk]

Yes, R for android, please!!!

[jem]

R on Android
when does it come out?

I bought an android device just for this but even the analytic-droid which is supposed to come with android was missing on sonyericsson x10 mini pro android phone and i cant find a way to dowload and install it since it is not in the official android market!!

[Get iPhone 4 Free]

I don't know how to run Debian package management system. I want to install R. Any help?

[ffxiv gil]

I doubt it will handle medium/medium-large datasets very well. I opened a csv with about 10,000 elements and it definitely chugged while navigating the spreadsheet.

[Pat]

Not sure but I don't want to jailbreak my iPhone. I still want to keep it in its default state.

[@cmprsk]

I've managed to install R in a 3G iphone running ios4, but I've got some issues. The installation is very simple, as described in the Rwiki referred above. One must only have debian subsystem and package installer (Cydia, by Saurik). Add the repository created by ech0chrome to Cydia (manage>packages>add), browse for R the statistical language and voilá! The install was apparently flawless for me, and I could run R from mobile terminal. Unfortunately iphone-gccplus, one of the dependence libraries was not installed, probably because of reported compatibility issues in the libgcc library with ios4. I've installed succesfully fake-libgcc and iphone-gcc with headers as described by Anastas Stoyanovski. Again, I've run into issues because R would not update or install packages. It gives error messages showing failure in the compiling of the downloaded packages. As package compiling depends on C and fortran and cross-compiling, the problem may be with toolchain, which is lacking for iphone os4. I tryed to reach ech0chrome through twitter, but s(he) blocked me before I could send a DM. I am know waiting for someone to give me some clue about R installation in ios4.

[David Smith]

@cmprsk, you might also want to check out this more recent post about installing R on ios4:
http://www.compmath.com/blog/2010/09/r-on-the-iphone/

[@cmprsk]

David, thanks for the support! A little updating: I could download and install via ssh (using dpkg) the packages iphone-gccplus and toolchain from ech0chrome repository. Somehow I couldn't do this by Cydia, but it was straightforward this way. So, I've installed all the dependencies for R and also the toolchain. Nevertheless, the problems still continued. R runs ok, and some packages install without problems (like dyn, season, pixmap). However, packages that depend on fortran could not be installed or updated (like MASS, survival, prodlim, cmprsk, coxphf). When we try to update MASS, one of the messages inform that R successfully detected a C compiler and a fortran compiler but that it cannot cross-compile. Previously this year, Jobs stated publicly that ios4 would largely restrict cross-compiling and I bet this is one case. Ah, well, I gonna have to wait for some genius to hack ios4. Meanwhile, R is usable in my iphone, even if its not fully functional. This was a major accomplishment, thanks to ech0chrome.

[Hades20]

I'm not sure the URL for the source package i.e. (http://leafmoon.users.sourceforge.net/cydia/) works, does anyone know of another source.

[Adam Hyland]

Yeah that repo is down. I don't know how bespoke any of the libraries or binaries were.

[Hades20]

Since I've been unable to get R, I've looked into other packages. Python seems to work quite well on my 3G Touch and almost all of the required components are available directly off Cydia. Ruby is also available, but I'm not a user, so I don't know how its functionality compares to other platforms.

[Hades20]

Just to let you know the repo

http://leafmoon.users.sourceforge.net/cydia/ is back on line.

R for Iphone is up and running again. Installation info given at.

http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=getting-started:installation:iphone

[Ryusuke]

R on Android
I bought an Android mobile phone as well, somebody know if R programming able to be mobility?

[moog]

Just curious - what in the world is the point other than saying it can be done? I "run" R on my iPod/iPad all the time via screen sharing or terminal apps - and have 12 cores 16GB RAM at my disposal instead of the measly (in the context of data analysis) iPod/iPad hardware.