Android or iPhone which is better catch? Breaking the ice

Smart gadgets and applications for them are the new buzz in the web development world. Looking at their business gains business owners as well as developers are enticed by their rising popularity. However the several development platforms the confusion has also risen.

However, if we sideline the others and the focus on the two leading the ones the confusion and the fight among the platforms certainly doesn't ends. Of late Apple has updated to iOS 4 and Google's open source operating system Android is competing with one another, which results is chaos for business owners whether to hire android or iPhone developers.

Moreover, another question for Iphone and android developers is how to get their apps maximum customer exposure- going for iPhone or Android or both of them ? What bottlenecks are there, and how does a mobile app developer counters them? There are numerous questions which pops up while choosing a development platform and in this blog we will contemplate the best answers.

Plethora of Programming languages

It is going to be a bit tricky for programmers foresee the code working on multiple mobile operating platforms.

As we know that Android applications are programmed in the Java language. Wherefore, several programmers have made their forte in enterprise development by gaining proficiency in Java, so developing for Android platform has become the most suitable platform.

Moreover, mobile apps that are native for the iPhone mobile operating system are programmed in Objective-C, which is some what an extension of C language that comprises of features of Smalltalk. (Looking at the technical aspect, Objective-C is a superset language of C though a small but a strict one, therefore a C program can be compiled with a compiler of Objective-C, which allows a developer to incorporate a C code in an Objective-C class.) Further, the programmers who have a forte in C and C++ programing while working on them throughout their career

will possibly won't encounter many difficulties in programming in Objective-C , though there are several ups and downs on the way.

"There is no obvious way to write one set of code that targets both platforms," adds Matthew Baxter-Reynolds, of AMX Software Ltd., a leading web development organization in England, and he has also authored a forthcoming book 'Multimobile Development: Building Applications for Any Smartphone.' He further adds "You cannot run Java on iPhone, and you cannot run Objective-C on Android."

Programming for multiple platforms

Earlier the biggest problem in the web app development was to code for several native platforms specific to devices which was an extremely extravagant idea. But with the advancement in the technology there is a considerable air of relaxation for the business owners as there are new tool kits and hybrid mobile app development platforms which have arrived in the marketplace which has made it easy for programmers as well as business owners to craft iPhone applications without acquiring knowledge of Objective-C.

Nitobi's PhoneGap ,Rhomobile's Rhodes, Ansca's Corona and Appcelerator's Titanium are the mobile development tool kits which make it comparatively simple to develop mobile apps that can run on multiple platforms such as Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Symbian platforms.

Though, these runtime frameworks and emulators are new to the development world but they tell that the idea of cross platform apps was not vague and its future is not bleak. While simple apps which renders web access and fetching information to the users on their phone are fit for these mobile app development technologies, on the other hand mobile apps which demand highly technical calculations and ample of database access -- which comprises of some code for specified business functions applications – cannot be built via these frameworks. This is because working of a compatibility framework comes with their due bottleneck and overheads which is not palatable to most of the mobile app developers.

Till date we do not have a fortified cross-platform framework for building complex apps such as games, editors or apps which require high end business logic such as banking systems.

The Long and Short of it is that you need to go for native platforms if you need to build app which are way too complex for these newbie cross-platform frameworks. What you can do at the most to save your cost is to analyze the sales of the two major platforms and then accordingly hire for iPhone or Android developers.