I am looking into the possibility of doing some mobile app development, firstly for Iphone and then later possibly for Windows phone and Android. I am familiar with .NET development and am wondering about what options to consider. I have read a little about Mono Touch and Phone Gap, what are the advantages and disadvantages of these and are there any other better options anyone could recommend? Or is it really necessary to learn Objective C for Iphone, and Silverlight for Windows phone etc?
I am looking into the possibility of doing some mobile app development, firstly for
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Have a look at Appcelerator Titanium. Its a pretty decent cross platform app creator for iPhone and Android.
However, the problem is that Android and iPhone (and Windows Phone) are different platforms. For instance, iPhone has navigation controllers with title bars and Android doesn’t. Thus you can put buttons in the title bar on iPhone, but not on Android. Eventually you get to the point where you’re writing specific code for each platform, even though you’re supposed to be writing once and deploying to many places.
Personally the overlap isn’t worth the time saved. It makes the code base much more complicated and less maintainable. Plus you can’t do as much with those cross platform tools as you can if you do everything natively.
Lastly, who doesn’t want to learn a new skill? Why do something the easy/quick way when you could learn how to make iphone, android and windows phone apps natively, which may help you in the future with freelance work or indeed your career.