This is a question to all of you out there who develop for both Android and iPhone. How do you maintain support for the two platforms? Specifically, do you
maintain the two products totally separate from each other?
create "native" GUIs in Java/ObjC and a "core" library in C/C++?
write both versions in the same language (e.g. Java) and a third-party tool to generate code for each platform?
write everything in the same code base and use an even more fancy tool to generate native bindings for each platform?
I do create "native" UIs in Java/ObjC and core library is usually in C/C++. That's when the application I am maintaining requires a complex core library.
When the application is simple enough, I just maintain two code bases: Java/ObjC-CocoaTouch.
As far as I know, there are no fancy tools to generate binding for each platform. Maybe Monotouch will officially support Android at some point and you will be able to do everything in C#: Android, iPhone and Windows Phone 7!
Related
So I am currently using Xamarin for multi-platform mobile applications. I really like the way this works, and I want to improve my flow. My developers have said that they would be much faster when programming natively (i.e. Swift for iOS in XCode).
I have looked for a solution, where I can create a shared project and use it in native apps, but I have only found ways that involve programming in one language for all platforms.
Is there a way to create a shared project, which can be imported into a native application (or better, can be run together, like a shared project in Xamarin)?
The language for the shared code is not important, as long as it isn't slow.
My developers have said that they would be much faster when programming natively (i.e. Swift for iOS in XCode)
Swift can be used natively for iOS apps. RemObjects' Silver is supposed to make Swift ready for Android and .NET. I've never tested it. Try it out, it's free.
RoboVM can be used to write iOS apps in Java. I didn't try it out either.
Language mixing with Xamarin
In case you want to mix Swift code with C# code using Xamarin then you can bind Objective-C compatible Swift code and use it in iOS projects only. You are not able to execute Swift code on Android or Windows Phone! It's not possible to write platform independent business logic in Swift and and use it in a shared library or PCL with Xamarin.
You face the same restrictions for Java code on Android: You can bind JARs and use them in a Xamarin.Android project but you cannot use them on iOS or Windows Phone.
You are also unable to execute C# code in a Swift based app on iOS or in a Java based app on Android.
You can use native code in Xamarin apps via Binding Libraries. You cannot use Xamarin libraries in native apps.
If the goal is to use truly native tooling, in their standard languages (meaning not Xamarin) and still share code between iOS and Android, this can be achieved by writing your non-UI code in C++.
Here's a very interesting article about how Dropbox does exactly this.
C++ is natively supported on iOS and it is very easy to interface
between Objective-C and C++ using Objective-C++.
On Android, calling into C++ can be done through the NDK, which
reportedly is not a pleasure to use. Dropbox found Google’s meta-build
system gyp to work reasonably well. In addition, the Java Native
Interface is a pain you have to accept. But none of these issues is a
roadblock, and Steven expressed hope that Google or the community will
build better tooling support over time.
And here's a simple example of how to do this from another StackOverflow post
I need to create a common entity layer for my mobile phone application developments.(especially iPhone and Android platforms).Later on I want to develop some parts of business logic and interfaces with specific tools /languages used to develop for those two platforms.
(I've been searching about cross mobile frameworks and I know about most of the popular ones.
Rhodes,PhoneGap,Appcelerator,Corona,MoSync,Sencha Touch,jQuery etc.
People made various combinations with those frameworks to create native,native-like,mobile web based applications.
To create a cross platform application is not my main goal.)
This blogpost suggests ANSI C/C++ for porting applications across iOS and Android platforms.
http://community.developer.motorola.com/t5/MOTODEV-Blog/Porting-apps-from-iOS-to-Android-devices/ba-p/11144
Due to this blogpost I think it is possible to create an entity layer to be mapped and used on two platforms.
Had anybody ever tried to achieve this? Or know any other way to implement an entity layer to be used in both iPhone and Android?
By using ANSI C/C++, i.e. standard C/C++ without extensions, it will make an easier porting, but it also depends on the libraries (libc version an so on). With Android you can either use the JNI or code a native activity, but obviously that isn't portable and the idea of using native code is performance, not portability.
I am not much clear with the "Cross Platform Apps." Can we really built up some apps which can run on iPhone/iPad , Android Phones/Tabs , Blackberry , Nokia (Any platform or more than one platform at least) ?
I have heard something like WAC , Titanium but really not clear with all these. Please help me out.
There are some good frameworks out there to build cross-platform mobile applications:
Titanium: It is a framework to build Android, IPhone (and BlackBerry, still in beta it seems) using javascript, that will compile to native applications for the platforms specified.
Rhodes: A ruby framework, that supports almost all the mobile platforms out there (recently they added support to WP7). It has an MVC structure, and can use RhoSync to synchronize the data to a server side application.
PhoneGap: Another javascript framework, but it supports more platforms than Titanium, because it doesn't compile to native applications, but it embeds a web application inside a native application (web apps/web views are supported in each platform, so it's easier to handle the portability this way).
The apps will have access to the hardware, like the camera/gps, through some generic apis.
In some case you can build specific native module to integrate them in just one application platform if you need to.
These frameworks are useful to build cross-platform application writing just one application, without having to write each single application with the platforms sdks.
They have some (or many) limitations. If your application are simple enough you can consider using one of those framework. But for more complex ones, sometimes, if you target only a couple of plaforms, it could take less time to build each one with native sdks individually than using one of this cross-platform framework, because of their limitations (I highly prefer using the Android SDK than using Titanium).
I'm new to mobile phones development, but I wonder whether there is any way to develop native apps (HTML-based apps is another story) that would run both on Android and iPhone? I know that there exist applications available for both OSs, so I wonder how are they ported/developed for both targets?
You can simply have two different projects, with same design and graphics, or, you can do it with some frameworks like PhoneGap or Rhomobile.
The best way is to have two different versions of the code, so you can take advantage from the platform that you are using.
http://www.appcelerator.com/
You can share a significant amount of Non-UI logic and code libraries by taking advantage of MonoTouch and MonoDroid. They are native frameworks which provide C# bindings around iPhone's and Androids native APIs. They have the added advantage of being able to develop in C# which IMHO is nicer than Obj-C and Java.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
we can go for the XML VM to run the android apps in iphone.
Check this for more info.
xmlvm.org