If you have developed an app for mobile devices, which line did you take? [closed]

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Developing mobile apps is a challenging job.

Customers want to be present not only on iPhone and iPad but maybe on Android and other mobile platforms like Windows Phone 7, B开发者_JS百科lackberry and Symbian, too.

It costs a lot of money to keep this apps up to date on different platforms. Besides the developer has to dig in different sdk's and learn different languages.

I thought about having just one app, that is rendered in a mobile browser like webkit, which is a standart for rendering web content.

Of course there are constraints like the use of camera or specific hardware for advanced rendering. But I think this will change over time.

How do you challange that? Do you re-use your code? Could mobile web be an alternative?

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If I had to make the same app for multiple platforms (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, etc.), I'd probably create a web app and utilize the new HTML5 features.

Alternatively, if you want to use the native languages (for added support with camera, etc.), it'd be quite hard to reuse the code. You could use the same logic, but you'd still have to rewrite a lot of the actual code.

Some other options could be Titanium or PhoneGap.

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Using a web app bundler like PhoneGap would be my choice.

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Mobile web can surely be an alternative.

I have been hearing a lot of things HTML5 is promising for mobile devices. If all of that becomes a reality, then we can really create web apps as powerful as native apps!

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If your app is fairly simple and doesn't require the camera, fancy graphics or location based services then a HTML5 app is the way to go. Otherwise what I would do is develop it on the platform that you are most comfortable with and then outsource development to people who are specialised in the other platform(s). It's hard enough keeping up with one platform let alone five.

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HTML5 is unfortunately not going to solve this problem for you because the companies have no vested interest in working together. We have tried middle layer products but you always come up against a roadblock that they cannot overcome or a device they do not support (e.g. our latest app is for BlackBerry PlayBook which uses Adobe AIR and a PlayBook SDK which is in constant flux).

My recommendation would be develop you apps using an early version of Java and implement this separately for each platform.

Good luck.