Over the past couple of weeks I have been slowly planning and revamping my iPhone app to address user concerns, bugs, and problems. And as part of the rework I decided to support other platforms, in addition to the iPhone, such as the iPad, Android, and Windows Phone 7. However with this new focus, I had one huge problem, how was I going to learn each new SDK.
This problem led me to struggle with if I should develop for each platform natively in its own language and SDK or use a cross platform programming language that would basically put a shim on top of the native SDK. The pros and cons of each approach where the following:
| Go Native | Not Go Native | |
| Pros | - Take full advantage of SDK - Design flexibility - Officially supported - Easier to integrate already developed toolsets | - Program once - Test once - No extra hardware to buy |
| Cons | - Many hours spent researching problems and pulling hair out - Have to test each platform individually - Buy extra hardware, (i.e. devices and in the case of the iOS a computer) | - Less design flexibility - Could only support the platforms that the cross platform toolset supported - Not officially supported - Harder to integrate toolsets (i.e. Native Adsense, Facebook Auth) - Limited access to accelerometer, GPS, and native hardware |
Eventually I came to the conclusion that I had to accept the fact that if I wanted to support all the platforms, I was going to have to use a cross platform programming language, because I am one guy with a limited amount of time and don’t really have time to learn Obj-C and Java on top of the SDK’s for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7. So I started browsing around and came up with the following options for developing cross platform:
- MonoTouch & MonoDroid : I would be able to share the C# code across the platforms with Windows Phone 7 app if I crafted the libraries for accessing the core data, but this choice still required me to use each platforms UI, so I would have to spend the time diving in to each individual platform.
- JavaScript & PhoneGap : This seemed like a perfect solution, because I know JavaScript and HTML, and PhoneGap would turn them into native applications by running them in a shell browser on the device, however this severely limited me in what I could do with the UI.
I really found the fact that I could continue to program in C# with MonoTouch and MonoDroid very alluring. But, ultimately I decided I was going to go with jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap, because I lacked the time to even dive in to MonoX frameworks, and I already had a solid grasp of HTML and jQuery so I decided to use PhoneGap as the platform for my next release. If you have never used PhoneGap here is how they explain it on their website:
PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Build apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of core features in iPhone/iPod touch, iPad, Google Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs. Learn More ›
Sounds great huh? Well it sort of is, but has some rough spots when reaching outside of the browser. But so far I have been able to successfully do the following from JavaScript from within the browser:
- Popup Native Alerts
- Get GPS coordinates
- Vibrate The Device
I will be posting updates during the development process here on my blog. And the nice thing about doing something with HTML and JavaScript, is that I can share them all with you through your browser with out ever having to deploy the app to a single device. So that part I am completely thrilled with.