Citrix has committed enough developers and resources not only to building the hypervisors, but also doing it quickly enough that a new Receiver version will be available any time a major new device ships, he says.

Even that won't solve the overall problem of having no standard hardware or firmware, however, Song says.

"With Android, because it's open and its hardware architecture is open, it's not that difficult to virtualize," he says. "The question is what happens when you get to a more closed architecture; I'm not even sure it's legal to virtualize an iPhone at the hardware level.

"And on software [with a Type II hypervisor], forget about it," Song says. "Apple is not going to let you come in and virtualize it to run another OS."