I’m an iOS coder and have been asked to write some cross platform code with Phonegap or Titanium. There’s plenty of information out there about setting up development environments, etc… except I’m missing one crucial piece of information.
What mobile hardware should I buy? Now that’s a pretty lousy stackoverflow question, so let’s rephrase it to be useful.
What criteria needs to be examined in choosing an Android tablet for iOS/Android cross platform development with PhoneGap or Titanium?
The corollary question is also useful, what criteria needs to be examined in choosing iOS hardware for cross platform development with PhoneGap or Titanium?
A good general approach is to pick high volume devices with an eye toward diversifying hardware- so for example if samsung has a really high res phone, don’t buy another really high res phone from LG or if all the available Android phones are high res, try to sprinkle one in that has a slide out keyboard. Don’t worry about trying to test everything on every device, test things that should work the same across a small number of devices and then test the things that could be very different on a larger number of devices. Depending on your app there are probably a few things that you know could behave differently on different devices- focus on this. For example, we test the camera on all devices but we would only test something like an alert message on one device.
If you are looking to build for iOS and Android I would also recommend checking out Brightcove App Cloud – http://appcloud.brightcove.com. There are good testing/debugging tools and plugins are well-documented and fully supported.