Developing for Android in Java or Adobe AIR or Titanium or PhoneGap?

I have been developing for Android since some time now and I found Java as proper way of doing development in it. But, now there are number of options available for developing in Android such as Titanium, PhoneGap and Adobe AIR.

The question is who will come as a winn开发者_StackOverflow中文版er for Android development. I have read lot of comparisons between Titanium, PhoneGap and native Android development. Now, with Adobe entering into it too, what is the future of Android Developers who develop with Java as the programming language.

Since, if one can develop for Iphone and Android with Titanium and Adobe AIR then why will one want to waste time and money for separate development.

The biggest reason I can think of is that using the native language/libraries of the platform (in this case iPhone or Android) is that it will allow you to provide a user interface/experience that is more in line with what the system designers intended over what will likely be possible with something like Adobe AIR.

That doesn't necessarily mean that AIR is bad, or that you might not be able to develop a good application, but since you'd be targeting multiple platforms with the same application code, and each platform has it's own subtle (or major) differences that you can't always account for, you will inevitably be forced to take a "least common denominator" approach to building an application that will run on all of your target platforms and behave consistently across them as well. This might not sit well with some users who expect a certain level of capability as you may not give them a consistent user experience compared to other native applications.

This is a long-standing issue with cross-platform application development -- the design philosophies and behavior of each system are intentionally different (otherwise why would anyone use them?), so your bound to run into problems making an application work 100% the same across them all.

As someone that has done cross-platform development in the past, I can say that while you can do it well in some cases, and using something like Adobe AIR might be a good avenue towards getting more familiar with a particular platform, but a lot of times it's just more prudent to buckle down and build an app using a system's native libraries/languages over a cross-platform solution.

It is quite simple actually. Developing an Android application using Java (the normal APIs) will allow you to a) target possibly all Android devices as all share the same base API and b) it won't put limitations on your application (or at least no limitations with the only limitation being the API).

Now PhoneGap, Titanium and Senza are all web-based frameworks which have certain limitations. You can't access certain functions of your phone as they simply are not some kind of replacement API it's just a framework.

Now Adobe AIR is another story. I'm not sure what functional limitations Adobe AIR will have but I know that there is quite a limitation when it comes to what devices you can target. There are some minimum requirements for Adobe AIR to operate which are

Android Device Requirements for Adobe AIR

Google Android 2.2 Operating system
ARMv7-A Processor OpenGL ES2.0 H.264 &
AAC H/W Decoders 256 MB of RAM

Which means you can target devices with earlier API versions.

Titanium compiles to native platform controls, but you must to use web languages like HTML and js to develop your application.

With special version for each platform you can design UI following system guidelines.

There seems to be an overall confusion regarding what Titanium is... It compiles to native platform controls.

The majority of the respondents have incorrectly stated that it is web based and that is not true.

However, that is true when it comes to phoneGap