The One Last Thread Holding Apple and Google Together

Once so close, Apple and Google are now as far apart as anyone in the high-stakes tech game. And yet, there’s one thing they still have in common, one last piece of technological brilliance they freely share with each another.

Chances are, you’ve never heard of it. But nowadays, it’s an integral part every new Apple iPhone — and every new Android phone. It’s not an app or a web service or some sort of hardware contraption. It’s more important than that. It’s a tool that’s changing the way we build and run computer software — any computer software. This tool is known as LLVM, short for low level virtual machine. But don’t let that throw you. The acronym isn’t even an accurate description of what the thing does. It’s just a name. The thing to realize is that LLVM underpins so much of the work at both Apple and Google, helping create not only smartphone software, but operating systems and browsers and web services. Created by a team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, LLVM is a way of building software compilers — those contraptions that receive raw code from the world’s programmers and convert it into real, live software applications. But it’s more than that. It’s also a better way of executing software applications on PCs and smartphones and tablets and other hardware. It lets you run programs on machines and microprocessors they weren’t explicitly written for.