We have Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, RIM, Symbian, Mozilla’s Firefox OS, Tizen, Ubuntu for mobile and many more in the market now with each having its unique set of features. Developing an app to support all these platforms is not feasible!
For example you develop an Andriod app for the Samsung Galaxy III and expect it to work the same on your Blackberry? No question, it will not work. But still there are ideas or solutions to put a smooth ending to this!
Solution:
* Use Translators. Write the app in one language and then have it “translated” to other languages that can be used on other phones. For this we need translators to translate from one language to other.
* Use Drivers or Translators. Develop an app using a framework say HTML, CSS, JS, Python, Ruby and PHP and run it on a driver that has access to all the scripts. By making this happen, you could run the app in mobile phones which have the similar kind of driver/translator.
But one disadvantage (both in driver and translator use) is that, you may not get access to local storage and also optimization could be a big problem!
* Develop the app with HTML5 which could provide direct APIs to GPS and other mobile-specific features.The core aim here, is to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4, but XHTML 1 and DOM Level 2 HTML as well.
* Cross-platform development tools :
– RhoMobile : It offers Rhodes – an open-source framework based on Ruby. This permits the developer to create native apps, spanning over a stunning range of OS’ and smartphones. The OS include Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, iPhone and RIM, which pretty much covers it all.
The framework supplied by RhoMobile is such that you only need to code once. This code can be used to build apps for most of the major smartphones. Native apps are great for working with available hardware, so your job gets done with ease, speed and accuracy.
RhoMobile also offers developers RhoHub, which is a hosted development environment, and RhoSync, which can be employed as a standalone server to keep all the app data current on the users’ handhelds.
– Appcelerator: Appcelerator’s Titanium Development Platform allows for the development of native mobile, tablet and desktop applications through typical web development languages such as JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby and HTML. Appcelerator also include customizable metrics for actions and events. App data can be stored in the cloud or on the device, and apps can take full advantage of hardware, particularly camera and video camera capability.
– PhoneGap : PhoneGap is a FOSS framework that helps you develop apps for iPhone, iTouch, iPad, Android, Palm, Symbian and BlackBerry devices using web development languages such as JavaScript and HTML. It also allows for access to hardware features including GPS/location data, accelerometer, camera, sound and more.
