What do you guys think about other iPhone development platforms like appmobi, Rhomobile, Titanium, PhoneGap and others.
I already have objective c/ iphone experience & some experience on Android. How will these platforms effect my performance in long run if I start using one of them. How customizable are they..?
And which one of them do you think is a better platform for development & why?
At the moment, I'm using jqTouch with PhoneGap.
I really believe that the future of apps is web apps.
The App Store has served a useful purpose - namely, getting people used to the idea of "apps" in the first place, but I don't think they can maintain their walled garden approach to providing software services forever.
The fact that content must be "approved" by a private company goes against everything the web stands for.
Rhomobile is a project I hadn't heard of before: thanks.
Every OS platform has it strengths and weaknesses, and users of each of these different OS platforms tend to have different expectations about subtile features in the UI behavior and the look and feel of apps running under their chosen OS & hardware.
If you already have the knowledge and experience to build and customize your apps for iOS and Android (and/or webOS, et.al.), using the tools and SDKs they were designed for, then you will likely be able to create a user experience better tuned to the typical users expectations, and with a reduced likelihood of needlessly increasing memory usage or decreasing battery life by adding layers of CPU consuming library code.
Alternate development platforms seem to me to be for those developers who find time-to-market and cross-platform consistency of greater value to them than spending the time to learn and to use the skills needed to optimize their apps for the capabilities for each unique OS and its corresponding UI experience.
I tested Rhomobile, Phonegap and Titanium.
The result at least for using this tool in a company are the following:
Rhomobile, looks ugly and unfamiliar to every user, crashes constantly on android, the framework and documentation looks very immature and there is no direct community of people that can help you with problems.
Phonegap says that they support the most platforms but looking at the project wiki it looks like a abandoned and not very well supported open source project that is not moving forward(No changes in the supporting feature timeline for two months). Have a look at the map itself there is no platform that isn't missing something more or less important. They are working on file io for the iphone, on multitouch and maps for android (why is orientation change not possible for android?) it looks like webos is at least mostly supported.
The last thing I tested was Titanium appcelerator and I think they made a very good job. The UI looks like Iphone on the Iphone and like Android on Android. They have some tutorials and videos online and there are people in their forum and here on stackoverflow that work with appcelerator it will take more time than it with android but you get at least some answers. If you have a small app that does not require UI fine tuning, or very special features and you are familiar with java script I would go for Titanium and test it.
Disclaimer I did this testing July 2010 there can be any changes in one of the systems until now.
Monotouch/droid should allow for cross platform development. Since it's c# it might be possible to extend parts of the same code to wp7 too