Using iphone specific libraries or not?

Question

I dabbled in some iPhone development and there seems to be two strategies:

• use the iPhone specific libraries with ObjectiveC & XCode
• use cross-platform libraries like OpenGL, OpenAL with C/C++ and an editor of your choice

Coming from the Windows/Linux C/C++ world, I took the second strategy and used Emacs and C/C++ for my app. I used a single ObjectiveC shim that passed messages into my application that was entirely C++. In theory, the main portion of it would run on other platforms if I replaced the outer wrapper that does iPhone specific stuff like allocation sound buffers, discovers file paths, etc.

So, what proportion of iPhone developers are embracing the XCode/ObjectiveC/iPhone-specific-libraries and what proportion are keeping that at a distance and writing more cross-platform-like code?

Answer 1

I think that when writing games you can get away with cross-platform libraries. When writing anything other than games though, you will have to do a significant portion in Objective-C anyway. For that reason I personally think it is easier to do the entire app in Objective-C.