3 Popular Cross Platform Mobile Apps Development Tools That You Shouldn’t Miss
Choosing a platform for mobile apps is a tough question that often comes up while deciding to develop a mobile app. The solution depends on the target audience and goals you have in mind while developing the application or alternatively develop using Cross Platform Technologies. Cross Platform technologies help developers to develop an application using a third party framework that supports various platforms. Although there are many Cross Platform Technologies, however Appcelerator Titanium Mobile Framework and Nitobi’s PhoneGap are the two famous Technologies being used today.
Released in December 2008 by Appcelerator Inc., Appcelerator Titanium allows developers to develop native applications for Android, iPhone and iPad. Blackberry support though announced in June 2010, is still in its beta version. It uses the JavaScript syntax along with the Titanium API, to develop native apps in Objective-C source, project binary for iOS, and, Java source, project binary for Android. Cloud-based services are also offered for applications developed using the Titanium platform.
PhoneGap, released in March 2009 by Nitobi, was later acquired by Adobe in 2011. PhoneGap allows developers to build a single web application which supports multiple mobile devices using JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3. Amongst various platforms it currently supports are Apple iOS, Google Android, HP webOS, Microsoft Windows Phone, Nokia Symbian OS, RIM Blackberry and Tizen. Blackberry 5 and 6 and Windows Phone 7 support is being implemented and Bada support is planned to come soon.
Another open source project is the Mono which was released on June 30, 2004, by Miguel de Icaza of Ximian along with his team. Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications. It is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .Net Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime. Mono runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, BSD and Sun Solaris, Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3, Apple iPhone. It also runs on x86, x86-64, IA64, PowerPC, SPARC (32), ARM Aplha, S390, S390x (32 and 64 bits) and more. MonoTouch released in 2009, helped in developing iOS apps using .NET along with the Mono Framework and MonoDroid released in 2011, allows developers to develop Android applications using Windows and the Visual Studio environment.
The Titanium and PhoneGap have very different targets and goals and thus to choose amongst the two is a matter of requirements. If you require an application with more native features and better performance than Titanium is the right choice and if you basically need an application that is basic and can be accessed across many platforms using a mobile web browser then PhoneGap will be best suited for your needs.
