Advice for a mobile app for reading a publication

Question

I'm considering developing apps for Android and Windows Phone 7 that allow the user to read content from an online producer (newspaper/magazine/blogs etc). This provider has a REST API that should allow for straightforward access to the content. A few questions I have:

• I saw an OData demo, where getting data from a feed was super easy, with no parsing of any sort required. Is it worth building an OData provider on top of the publication's existing API, just to make it easier for the mobile apps to get data?

• I have heard that C++ can be used on wp7 and Android. Is there any reason to develop an app core in C++, then interact with the device APIs in C#/Java? Or is the core logic layer of the app so thin that it's not worth the hassle? It seems like there's really not that much to developing a publication reader app - basically just a GUI on top of an API that provides all the data.

• Or, would it make more sense to just develop a mobile version of this publication's web site? Then there could be one service for all mobile platforms. What are the pros and cons of an app that runs on the device as opposed to a website specially built for mobile devices? (Like the Gmail, Google Docs, and GTalk "apps" for the iPhone.)

Thanks.

Answer 1

As far as I know, C++ cannot currently be used to develop WP7 applications. I would check on that before you try to go too far down a cross-compatibility road.

That said, the UI between WP7 and the iPhone is really, really different - the backend code is so small in comparison to well-written UI later, I'd just write two separate apps. It may seem like a time savings but either your app is going to look like it does not belong to one platform or the other, or you'll be spending more time trying to keep the compatible stuff working OK on two platforms.

Answer 2

C++ is not a development language for Windows Phone 7. There are two development platforms for WP7: Silverlight and XNA. There is no possibility of interop with a C++ module.