Mobile app dev - platform considerations

[murraybiscuit]

the decision of which platform to develop for really isn't a simple one. type of application, funding, licensing, approval & certification, competitiveness vs size of market, revenue commission and access to testing hardware are all issues which need to be factored in.

This article is a few months old, and some of the costs have changed since, but it does help to highlight some of the true costs of each platform.

http://creativealgorithms.com/blog/content/earning-living-independent-mobile-software-developer

i've also found some some interesting cross-platform development tools which might help with making more portable code:

http://rhomobile.com/products/rhodes/ a ruby-based framework for iphone, android, symbian, blackberry and winmo.
http://www.mosync.com/ a c++ framework for android, symbian, j2me and winmo (iphone and blackberry not available yet)

hope that helps somebody who needs it in future. feel free to add your 2c.

 

[WiT8litZ]

If you want a growing application and community, sticking to only 1 platform just isnt going to happen. Read an interesting article the other that said mobile fragmentation is here to stay, so just deal with it. There is no magic bullet unfortunately

 

[WiT8litZ]

Looked at mosync.com now. Looks very promising, I will give it a spin. If it works it will solve loads of headaches for me...