Quick overview of cross-platform mobile development

Question

I don't know the first thing about mobile application development. I'm starting my research now.

Can someone give me a quick overview of the top most popular, mature and cross-platform technologies for creating and running applications that work on iphones, blackberries, windows mobiles and androids? For example, let's say I want to create a mobile software application that monitors your heart rate and blood pressure via a piece of hardware connected to one of the mobile's port, and I want this to work on iphone, blackberry, windows mobile and android.

What development platforms should I consider? What are the pros vs. cons of them? How popular are they?

Answer 1

Platform will be dependent on the mobile phone you want to run that application. There are many other things apart from the port. These things are defined by the platform architecture. It includes event handling, UI, and much more.

You need to also test your application independently on each of these targets.

However you can make a web-application and have users use it via the mobile browser. This in some way can be said generic. It will work on all mobile browser's provided you follow the standards supported.

Answer 2

Phonegap might be what you're looking for. Basically you'll build a web-app that is local on the device and has access to JavaScript libraries which provide access to many of the device's OS APIs.

From their site:

What is PhoneGap?
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/iTouch, iPad, Google Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs.SDKs.

Answer 3

Talking about cross-platform technologies for developing smartphones apps, there are several options in the air, some based on HTML/Javascript, some based on Flex/ActionScript and some in Java.

In your particular case, where your app needs to interact with a piece of hardware, you want to be able to interface with the native platform world. For such case, I would recommend having a look at ELIPS Studio edited by OpenPlug that offers an interesting concept called Native Extensions. Native Extensions allow you to create a common app and UI in Flex/AS for the various smartphones and yet to implement platform specific extensions to interface with the native code of each platform. Full details on OpenPlug ELIPS Studio developer zone.

Answer 4

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3369413/what-is-the-common-things-across-mobile-platform