How to develop an application to work on both android and iphone?

[lavanya.hyma]

Hi my name is lavanya,
I want to develop an application and it should work on both Android and iPhone mobile platforms. I have two queries:
1) Do I need to develop the application individually using Android SDK and iPhone SDKs?
2) Is there any common platform (like Flash, Flux with Action Script etc.) to develop the application? So, I can install on both Android and iPhone mobile platforms?
Thanks in advance.

lavanya.

 

[tengence]

Though I have not done this, it is possible to develop apps for the andriod platform and the iOS in java. I use Objective C in Xcode for iOS, but I havent tried doing them in java. I hope that helps

 

[HRTapps]

There's no way to execute java on iOS, so you can't use that language to develop iOS apps. I haven't yet found a good "native" solution for both platforms other than writing two sets of code.

 

[amitginni]

You will pretty much have to do it twice for different platforms. If you were making a game or using a game engine, you could probably get away with it when using Unity3D.

 

[DanSilov]

One way to approach this would be HTML5. There are frameworks like PhoneGap which allow you to package your HTML5 application for up to 6 platforms (not just Android and iOS), and HTML5 becomes stronger every day.

However, we have investigated HTML5 as a potential direction and found that it's still in very early stage, it will work great for simple apps, but if you want something complex, need to go native.

 

[Apple Developer]

Different APIs == Different Duplicated Implementation.
I guess you can make core functionalities using low level languages and call these procedures from a higher one, but the overall App must be implemented twice because of the different APIs!.

 

[Patrice Khal]

Like DanSilov said, one way to do that is to use HTML5 framework like Phonegap who's free and great.
Of course, it's a bit limitated and the apps will need some adjustments (like sizes ratios differences) for each model.

 

[LittleBitStudio]

You can develop for Android and Ios using Corona or Unity.

 

[Jellotime91]

One way to approach this would be HTML5. There are frameworks like PhoneGap which allow you to package your HTML5 application for up to 6 platforms (not just Android and iOS), and HTML5 becomes stronger every day.

However, we have investigated HTML5 as a potential direction and found that it's still in very early stage, it will work great for simple apps, but if you want something complex, need to go native.

Yes, this!!!

But, overall for your users it will be a better experience if you develop 2 different apps with their native SDKs.

Develop the iOS app first, and then do the Android app. iOS is the cash cow so it's better to do iOS first and gauge response to the app.

 

[DAGASU]

Look for a cross-platform tool, there are many of them. You will only need to compile it and maybe minor conditional changes in code for each platform supported by the tool.

 

[Timhewitt]

Having done this I highly recommend coding each application for the specific platform. We used a cross platform tool I initially and then rewrote both apps from scratch because we felt the compromises were too great to try to stay with the cross platform tools.

-t

 

[cosborn]

I've been doing this by writing almost everything in C++. You can write C inside your Objective-C code as much as you want, and if you compile for Objective-C++ you can do C++ anywhere in your Xcode project as well. Android has an NDK (Native Development Kit) allowing you link in C++ code to your Java project as well.

So basically, I've written a lot of C++ libraries that do most of the work, with some appropriate #ifdefs when needed.. For iOS I compile the library as a static library that I link into an Objective-C++ shell of a program. For Android, I compile the same code as a dynamically linked library that I is linked into a Java shell of a program at runtime.

Mostly OpenGL based stuff, as there is some major common ground there.

 

[zmey]

If you choose to go with two different versions and using cocos2d framework, there's cocos2d port for Android now. You still have to rewrite everything from Objective C to C++ for Android but the code will look similar.

 

[joteykj]

You may also check Flash Builder 4.5, it supports development for both Android and iPhone apps.

 

[iiiisoft]

You could use HTML5