by Collin LeGault Rountree
3. November 2009 08:52
There are a ton of different cell phones out there. The problem that you run in to as a developer is deciding on which phone to develop an application for. Depending on your choice you end up deciding what language the application is written in, and in many cases what your limitations are going to be as a result of this decision.
Java: When writing apps for phones in java you gain portability. The problem here is that you can also gain a myriad of issues with particular phones, and particularly branded phones. Many carriers will place stringent security requirements on the java environment effectively disabling your ability to do many of the things you may wish to do within an application. The end result is that your portable application winds up not being very portable.
Going Native: This choice is the most limiting in that you will have to choose a specific base OS that you will be coding for. Even within this base OS, you will still have different screen sizes and phone capabilities to deal with between different kinds of the same phone. Specific carriers will identify a list of phones that they will use, so you will need to do testing with those models in order to insure full functionality within that carrier’s space. The end result is that your application may have to be tweaked when selling it to each carrier depending on which versions of the same phones a particular carrier will be using.
Some phones, like the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and the Palm Pre, have an SDK that allow for this variance between their different phone types, giving you the ability to ensure that your application will work on them regardless of the carrier. This is a great step in the right direction, but there is still the question of how do we solve this for the other phones?
Welcome HTML 5. I think that HTML 5 will create a marked difference in how application development will be handled on future handsets. Currently there are only 2 types of phones (the iPhone and Android using Safari and Androids browser respectively) that have had the foresight to ship with a browser that supports some of the HTML 5 spec. I understand that the Opera mini 5 beta has some support for HTML 5 as well, but it is not widely used by the end consumer at this point.
HTML 5 standards will allow for almost any type of application to be built in a web page. I think this will be the holy grail of portable (read will work in any HTML 5 compliant browser) mobile application development. I foresee a world of applications that will work on any phone and will be able to journey through carrier boundaries without being hampered by security limitations. These applications can be carrier owned, or hosted by third parties. In my opinion, developing very portable web applications has been a long coming dream that is finally coming to fruition. We just need the manufacturers to get on board.