Developing mobile applications: what platform to choose

All mobile apps developers always face choice of the right platform. The existing abundance of mobile operating systems can easily throw you into confusion. Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian — which of them is the best one? And moreover we should take into account a large number of the applications and frameworks developed by manufacturers of cell phones, communicators, PDAs and smartphones. Let’s come to know the particulars of all this mobile stuff.

First of all, a developer should define the main objectives:

• professional development of commercial mobile software or amateur development (open source);
• target audience;
• competitive abilities and competitive environment.

All this seems rather complicated. With relation to monetization (commercial development) it’s better to choose such leading OSes as iPhone and Windows Mobile. This variant has some significant pluses. For example: a large number of users who are ready to pay for their software. But at the same time you will have to compete with more than 200,000 developed mobile applications for Windows Mobile and iPhone. And as is well known Apple follows a quite tough policy of apps submission.  That is why it may take a long time before your new program is approved and appears in App Store.

To be continued…

Integration platform for mobile developers Eclipse Pulsar gets new features

Eclipse Foundation has released a new version of Eclipse Pulsar, open tool for cross-platform mobile applications development.

RIM devices like Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson and Sony Ericsson – In the near future Eclipse Pulsar will allow to develop mobile apps for these smartphones (RIM means “Research In Motion”, wireless communications).

Now creating applications for smartphones from different manufacturers mobile program developers have to use various SDK-sets corresponding to desired platform. It’s obvious that such conditions make their work more complicate, because they have to prepare different versions of the same program for different platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian, etc.).

Pulsar creates a unified environment based on Eclipse, which will allow developing multi-platform mobile applications. Now Pulsar supports SDK for Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson and Sony Ericsson. However, developers still have to create separate versions of applications for different phones based on integrated Pulsar SDK.

Integrated development environment Eclipse Pulsar

Today Pulsar supports Java-phones. In the future it is expected to support RIM devices based on BlackBerry (Apple iPhone support is also possible).