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Asked: 2026-05-27T18:30:26+00:00

Possible Duplicate: Developing cross platform mobile application I have been tasked with looking into

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Possible Duplicate:
Developing cross platform mobile application

I have been tasked with looking into software products that can be used to create an application that can be ported to work on different phones.

The application needs to connect to a database. It will need to allow users to choose from book lists and then download book information that can be read either online or offline. There’s no fancy graphics requirements and we are currently just looking to find out what products there are on the market that could help us.

Note we have no experience so we’ll not be doing development. We just want to do some research ourselves before calling in other companies to give us quotes for the work we need.

I’d very much appreciate if someone out there could point me to some products that I could look into.

Please don’t close this topic and say the answers are subjective. Yes I know that but at the same time I really need to get some ideas as to where to look.

Update:

Unity has been suggested as a tool I should look into. Does anyone have any experience with that tool?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    of course you can try to use something like MonoTouch (http://xamarin.com/monotouch)/MonoDroid (http://xamarin.com/monoforandroid), etc. to create more or less similar application using C# for example. But IMHO you should develop all version separately. Because all platforms are really differ from each other.

    Update: Nevertheless my answer is accepted I think it will be better to extend it a bit to make it even more clear.
    I think that idea in creating “one” application for all menthioned platforms is bad for next reasons:

    1. I’ve tried ModoDroid one day and I noticed that to run your application you have to install Mono run-time on users phone to run it. It adds if I remember correctly near 90mb of Mono stuff which is definitely not what user wants to when they download your 1mb appilcation.

    2. All menthioned platform obviously has their own OS which are relly different from each other which could possibly lead to different issues, possibilities and nuances with implementation.

    3. Each of menthioned platform has its own User Design Guidelines. So it will be strange/uncomfortable for the users to see on thier devices something they are not want to used to see.

    4. And of course creating specific application for specific platform will give you an option to emphasise strength of specific platform. Like live tiles on WP7 or widgets/cross application communication and direct SD card access on Android, etc.
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