Cross Platform Mobile App Development

In order to avoid headaches, reduce time, and reach a broader audience it is critical to have a good cross platform (or is that cross-device?) mobile application development framework to enable a "Write Once, Run Anywhere" experience without having your dev team try to learn five different SDK's and a zillion different libraries. With the plethora of different mobile platforms and operating systems, to reach the largest audience you would need to target at least 3 separate major SDK's - Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and RIM's Blackberry.

And then let's not forget the other smaller (but still significant) players, HP/Palm webOS, Microsoft's Win Phone 7, and Symbian.

So that's at least 6 separate SDK's and versions of mobile apps your team would have to build. Oh boy, that quick mobile app you wanted to build just got a lot harder.

Or did it? What if you could use a standard application development toolkit, maybe something a lot of developers already have experience with that worked across all the major mobile devices? That would suddenly cut your 6 separate SDK's back down to 1, plus some wrappers to get the native app's built and deployed on each platform.

Sounds pretty good - right?

Well - it's here, and it's HTML5. That's right, your favorite good old fashioned web development toolkit is also the best mobile development toolkit for building cross device mobile applications.

One of the best tools for packaging your HTML5 based app for each mobile platform is PhoneGap, an open source tool that uses each major SDK to provide a native mobile app for each platform. These HTML5 mobile apps have full access to native features and look like all the other apps you are already using. Heck, a lot of apps you are using are already developed using PhoneGap. They are working on additional enhancements to make automated build processes so that even the work of setting up and build five different flavors of your mobile app is automated.

Then there are various javascript libraries available to make your app shine and give you full development tools for building that killer business logic you need. Some of the ones AGS uses in our application development are:

1. JQuery Mobile - open source jQuery plug-in with great mobile app theming support
2. Sencha - ExtJS based commercial desktop & mobile app library
3. Rhomobile - a set of products for full enterprise mobile application development

By leveraging these tools and techniques, we are able to build full-featured mobile apps that work on multiple platforms at the same speed (or faster in some cases) as traditional web applications.