Everyone who is planning to build a mobile application has to answer the same question: ‘What approach should I take?’
I posted about this question before but while trying the Icenium beta I found the following interesting posts about this topic:
Inside these posts they talk about 3 possible answers to build mobile applications:
- Native apps are built for a specific platform with the platform SDK, tools and languages, typically provided by the platform vendor (e.g. xCode/Objective-C for iOS, Eclipse/Java for Android, Visual Studio/C# for Windows Phone).
- Mobile Web apps are server-side apps, built with any server-side technology (PHP, Node.js, ASP.NET) that render HTML that has been styled so that it renders well on a device form factor.
- Hybrid apps, like native apps, run on the device, and are written with web technologies (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript). Hybrid apps run inside a native container, and leverage the device’s browser engine (but not the browser) to render the HTML and process the JavaScript locally. A web-to-native abstraction layer enables access to device capabilities that are not accessible in Mobile Web applications, such as the accelerometer, camera and local storage.
By the way I can really recommend to have a look at Icenium, it is a cross-platform mobile development solution using HTML5 & JavaScript to build apps that run natively on iOS and Android. But what makes Icenium really nice is that it offers a full IDE in the cloud to do this(and also a local environment if you’re not into cloud ).