Developing web app, question for mobile developers

Question

I'm going to develop a web app that I expect some people will also end up wanting to view on their phones. The UI will be fairly straightforward (no frames, just CSS/HTML). May have a bit of Flash, but not for the first version.

My question is, for testing viewing of the web app on mobile devices what devices would you recommend that I test on (and thus, most likely, have to purchase)?

• Windows Mobile
• iPhone
• Android
• Other?

or can I use emulators for any/all of these?

Note that I'm not developing a platform (android, iPhone) specific app, just a web application that I expect will also be accessed from a mobile phone.

I apologise if this seems like a niave/stupid question, but this hobby project is totally away from my commercial experience and I just don't know the answers to these questions, hence asking here. Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

You can use emulators for all of the mobile platforms you've listed.

For the iPhone, if you're on a Mac, you can use the native iPhone Simulator that comes with the iPhone SDK (available here). If you're using Windows, you can use this third-party emulator that attempts to render web pages as they would be seen on the iPhone (by forcing a specific aspect ratio and spoofing the user-agent, probably).

For Android, you can use the Android emulator that comes with the Android SDK. A word of advice, though: usually, what works in the Android browser will also work in the iPhone browser, since they both use the WebKit rendering engine.

For Windows mobile, you'll want to download the Windows Phone emulator available with the Windows Phone developer tools (for new, unreleased handsets), as well as the Windows Mobile 6 emulator (for the majority of current Windows Mobile handsets).

Also, Flash won't work on any of the aforementioned platforms (although it will work on Android devices at some point in the future), so make sure that Flash is not integral to your web application's functionality.

It doesn't hurt to check out recent mobile browser statistics, either, so you know where to focus your efforts.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

You should not forget the smartphone with the biggest market share (at the moment). Simulators for all BlackBerry devices can be downloaded here:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/resources/simulators.jsp