Smartphone Development Framework & Platform?

Question

I am a C Sharp.NET & Silverlight developer and now thinking to swicth to SmartDevice development specially for iPhone & Andriod based phones. I have looked over web and found some cross platform development frameworks like

http://developer.openplug.com
http://www.phonegap.com/
http://android.xamarin.com/Welcome

but not sure about which to choose. Naturally I would like to keep my learning curve less but also would like to choose platform which provides more power, so I am looking for your suggestions and 'Getting Started' tips and also which device you think will be in demand in future iPhone or Android ? .

Thanks, Maverick

Answer 1

I wouldn't recommend any of those. The problem is, that those "cross-platform" development frameworks, still aren't cross-compilable . This means you still need to develop an application for each platform, but you can reuse heavy calculations if you are using models af MVC.

Another thing is that those frameworks still aren't 100% native supported, so you'll loose some features from the native frameworks when developing applications. I've read a lot of articles and to be honest, these cross-platforms seems to be dying out, cause both Android and iOS are moving very fast in each their direction and the cross-platforms cant keep up. But it's still up to you.

In would recommend you to choose one of those platform and learn it from scratch. With your C Sharp background, maybe iOS and Objective-C would be the most natural choice. Enjoy

Edit: Regarding you last question: I dont think it matters which one you choose, both will be domination for a long time. You should pick the one you can identify yourself with.

Answer 2

since you are C# dev, go for MonoTouch. I heard good things about it.

Answer 3

Miguel de Icaza is behind Xamrin. He wrote the most prolific .NET platform for UNIX, mono. I believe both he and his team have the capacity to bring you the most coverage for common features on Droid and iOS. My friend has a startup and is releasing an app shortly for iOS on Xamrin. It is a video streaming app.

HTML 5 will get you the most cross platform for the investment. Of course, like everyone else has said, if you need lots of native integration or if you want to use the latest APIs upon availability, you have to go native.