I’m new to mobile dev and I’m interested in developing the application for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7. And I’d like write less code. For the present time I see that C++ may fit well.
What I know is that :
it’s possible to use C++ with Objective-C even in one file together for iOS, and I can link my c++ libs.
it’s possible to use C++ through NDK on Android.
So I can write most of my app in c++ (except some very specific platform dependent parts) and make calls to my app through some sort of exposed Facade, right?
What can be done with windows phone 7? I know that it’s .Net based. And in .NET it’s possible to call code from c++ win32 dll’s. But what with wp7? I wouldn’t like to rewrite everything to C#.
Or maybe all this crossplatform game isn’t good idea. Are there some critical pitfalls? Maybe it’s better to have Obj-C only for iOS, Java only for Android, and C# only with it’s silverlight and xna, and to maintain all this zoo separatelly?
Experienced mobile devs please share your experience.
Note, that on Android, C++ is not fully supported. It’s more about pure C.
Programming in C on android is basically reserved for games. If you don’t want to make your UI in OpenGL, forget it and just write it in Java. You’ll need a small Java wrapper anyway.
The same applies for iOS – if you use only OpenGL, you can write everything in C and use obj-c only as a small application wrapper.
From that you can see this is reserved mainly for games. There are tools available (e.g. http://www.madewithmarmalade.com/) which can help you develop openGL games easily)
The main differences between the platforms arise from the different UI frameworks. There are tools that try to help you overcome the differences – most of them are based on HTML 5 and they are using CSS to simulate the native UI. Usually you have to sacrifice a lot of user experience.
You have to understand that if you want your application to look perfect on different platforms, you have to write the UI separately and natively for each platform. Even UI design must be different. iPhone and iPad need lots of cool animations, they must be perfect for portrait & landscape mode (including the rotating animation), using navigation bar, toolbar, split view… Android users expect something else – a different (menu) toolbar, you need to port it to a lot of different screen resolutions and the user experience will be different.
I would recommend to start with native iOS and if the app is profitable (if this is the reason for your app), develop it for other platforms. iOS app always generate most money.