views:

100

answers:

6

Hi folks.

develop android apps that should support iphone,ipad,android.is there any way for developing this kind of generic app or we need to develop aps depending on mobile os

+2  A: 

Though it is possible to create an universal application for iphone and ipad i don't think you can do the same for Android.

In my opinion it is always better to port your application to Android based on your requirements so that you can take advantages of the API's that the platform is offering you.

Rahul
A: 

On Android, you're using Java as the main language, and you can also use C and C++ . On iOS, you're using Objective-C as the main language, and also can use C and C++. So the common denominator would be C (at least on the iPhone there are no C++ GUI classes). I have no idea about developing on Android, but on iPhone it's no fun to purely work in C (and I'm not sure if it's even possible, maybe it is but should I when working with Objective-C/Cocoa is fun).

What you can do is write generic logic and share that between both systems, like a library. For example, I worked on a project where we used a C++ SIP/VoIP library that also compiles and runs on Symbian. It shouldn't be a big problem to write C code that can be shared between iOS and Android, as long as it is mostly about logic and not about calling system-specific stuff (you can of course include system specific stuff and guard that with #ifdef but you don't want your library to have more system-specific than system-agnostic code, I guess). For example, if you intend to write a networked game you could implement the network protocol in a way that could be shared between iOS and Android.

But as soon as you're hitting the GUI level I don't think you can share any code, and even if you could you probably don't want to because if you use the native languages/IDEs you are faster designing the GUIs each in their respective main languages/IDEs than trying to find a common way and then have to live with compromises and trying to make it work on both systems all day long. Better to implement the GUI native to each platform (e.g. Xcode has a very good graphical tool called Interface Builder that can save a lot of work/typing).

DarkDust
+1  A: 

We are struggling with the same question at the moment. Since we are working for Android, Maemo, Meego, iPhone and Blackberry (+Symbian 3 soon), HTML5 looked promising, and we dedicated quite some time investigating it. The end result was HTML5 is not yet ready for the development we were hoping for. It's fine if you need simple functionality, but as soon as something more advanced is needed, you need to create a different version. Even if it suits your needs, every platform requires different HTML5-to-native bridge, and every platform has a different engine. As you can see, only front end part could be partially used.

In your case, you need two different applications, one for Android, another one for iPhone/iPad. Try to see if you could take advantage of HTML5, if not, you are unfortunately stuck with separate development for some time to come. Unless you will create a web app and use it with device's browser.

David Kuridža
+2  A: 

You can try using a framework named Titanium Appcelrator. This framework will help you target iPhone, iPad, Android with the same code base. This also lets you access most of the Native hardware features available with these platforms but not all. It seems that this also may support Blackberry soon.

Krishnan
+1  A: 

You can create common functionality libraries with C or C++ and use these libraries in iPhone/iPad and use Android's NDK tool to integrate theses libraries with Android

Mina Samy
A: 

we can go for the XML VM to run the android apps in iphone. Check this for more info. xmlvm.org

bsjagadeesh