Which platform is used in companies now-a-days to implement mobile applications?

Question

Basically i would like to know which platform is currently used to develop mobile applications i.e. J2ME etc etc... Also any new ideas on mobile applications would be quite helpful.

Answer 1

We are primarily targeting the iPhone, but don't always make an iPhone-specific application. The web browser on the iPhone is good enough that a lot of our web apps just run there ok. So many of the apps we're writing continue to be done using the same platforms we've always used. We're a big institution so this runs the gamut from J2EE and .NET to Php and Ruby.

Mobile-only apps are developed in XCode (or web versions in DashCode).

Answer 2

Generally, the approach is to go for a website, if possible, and adapt it to each phone using a 'device detection layer'. We use DeviceAtlas.

If you want to write native applications for each phone, then you need to do it in each of the native languages (and there are a lot).

• Symbian/Java: Greatest 'penetration'
• iPhone/iPod Touch: Latest trend, objective-c for this.
• Android: I think this is a variant of Java, and will be a very marginal component of the market for a long time, though maybe high among a certain type of techies.

Basically, you are going to need to profile your market, and determine the best approach. But as I said, in general, you'd prefer a website, and mostly, a website is all you need.

Answer 3

If you need to cover multiple mobile (esp. smartphone) platforms, Javascript (with HTML and CSS) may be the only way to go, despite all its limitations. You get under the radar of Apple's iPhone app vetting, it's the only way to target Pre, you can also cover Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, AND Nokia on a single codebase... unless the limitations are just TOO stifling for your specific purposes, it sure seems like the way to go!

Answer 4

There is a framework called Rhodes by Rhomobile that allows development of native applications for all major smartphones. See my answer to a similar question earlier this year.