Creating apps for both iphone and android Options

[Shub0xx]

Good afternoon everyone,

Just wanting to know if it is possible to create a single app to operate on both platforms, and if it is possible, what software would you recommend?

I am curious, as it may relate to the major project I am participating in this year as part of my Bachelor degree..

[priorax]

I am no expert, but I am going to say no.

The reason I say this is that they run different operating systems, so they would probably need to be programmed using different languages or libraries, at the very least you would need to use different IDEs.

If you are interested in developing Android applications, a good place to start learning is http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/
This is a web-based utility designed by Google for people who are interested in learning.

[Slurpee]

Well yes i guess depending on what it is if its a game we at uni use unity 3d which is a game engine and it exports to both operating systems just have to change the controls and inputs and some coding, i would say there are programs which also make apps (not just games) that will do this

[montycarlo]

HTML5 with wrappers for each.

[Terajiogga]

Take a look at PhoneGap - write your code in HTML5 (or one of the many HTML 5 compliant frameworks), and deploy / convert using PhoneGap. It's basically a wrapper that supports Android, iPhone and others. In doing so, you have direct access to the hardware API (so you can, for instance, use the camera or GPS on an iPhone using the PhoneGap API).

http://www.phonegap.com/

[SaddaM]

Wow I posted in wrong thread? ><

[Super Roach]

Came here to also post about using PhoneGap. It's a wrapper like mentioned for html code, which can use hooks to get access to the native hardware as needed.

An alternative which I'm starting to move to however is Titanium.
The main reason for this is that it uses the native api more extensively, for example it uses the inbuilt google maps for showing maps, instead of the webpage version (native is much faster).

Those will cross compile to iphone and android fine.

[wolfmother]

I haven't really done much mobile development so I can't really talk, though I think there are a couple of mobile developers that drop by here every now and then...

The primary language Android apps are written in is Java. The primary language iPhone apps are written in is Objective C.

While they are both modern, garbage-collected object-oriented languages, they have a LOT of differences. Porting between them is nontrivial and on such resource-constrained machines it's not practical to automatically port/emulate between them.

While there are examples of languages which have interpreters for both platforms (HTML is one, but while HTML5 and JavaScript are quite powerful, you can't really write "real" apps in them), and while Java isn't "native" code anyway, there's no good solution other than making an application which is sufficiently well-designed and modular enough to be able to port between languages easily. OOP principles and patterns should be portable between any OOP language once you know the syntax and concepts*.

If you're making a game (just a hunch), there are already a number of high-profile game engines which work on both platforms with their own scripting language. If you're talking about an everyday application, you're up the creek without a paddle unless you don't mind taking up both languages.

*ObjC I believe uses some concepts from SmallTalk and other message-passing languages, so things might get a bit tricky there...