To Go Native Or Not To Go Native… That Is The Question

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.