Web technologies playing a bigger role in mobile app development
JavaWorld has a great write-up looking at 6 different mobile platforms, iPhone, RIM, Android, Symbian, Palm OS and Windows Mobile. If you are looking at bringing a mobile app to the market, it is definitely worth a read.
The article points out that building apps for each platform natively (using their own developer kits – SDK’s) is very tricky, but one would be surprised at what can be done with Web Technologies – HTML/JavaScript/CSS. The big drawback of that approach has been the lack of access to Location (GPS), Sound, Camera etc. We could not agree more, and have closed that gap with our platform – Breeze which offers easy to use web languages but access to all the great features of the phones.
As we’ve pointed out before, Palm’s webOS takes a similar view.
From the article:
The Web and HTML promise to play an even bigger role in the new Palm OS than in the iPhone, and that’s bound to be useful for everyone except game programmers looking for maximum performance.
As the browser gets better and better on devices, Web technologies are going to start playing a bigger role, but it is nice to know there are a few players bridging the gap between what is offered on the web, and all the features on the mobile device.
Tags: mobile apps, mobile development