Mobile Development

Our Lecture November 3rd was lead by Chuck Hudson, Director of Applications at Control4 and a member of the PayPal developers council, and Co-Author of the HTML5 Developers Cookbook.  Our talk covered many areas of mobile development and we spent most of our time talking about the iOS and Android platforms.  With the launch of the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace mobile development has seen a massive growth due to the release of SDK's.

One of the topics chuck discussed was Android vs iOS development.  He noted that you can no longer develop for only the iOS platform to be ultimately successful, you have to develop for Android as well.  Since the iOS and Android markets are becoming equally massive, it has become worth it to begin creating multi-platform applications.  He also talked about how localizing apps for different languages is not as time consuming or difficult as it used to be but that it is also becoming less and less worth it to do because English is seemingly becoming the language for mobile apps.  The bottom line is the less versions of an app you have on each platform the more efficient you can be when it comes time to update each of them.

Another issue that Chuck brought up was a problem with fragmentation in the android market.  Several manufacturers create phones that run Android.  Each of the devices can have a different size screen, aspect ration, or resolution.  This makes developing apps for the platform a big tricky for designers in comparison to the limited number of variations in iOS devices.  The openness of the Android platform is great for fast growth and collaboration but also creates a bit of inconsistency that can make developing working apps harder for the platform.