When Android was still in production, there was much speculation that iron-fisted Apple was going to lose many developers to the open source platform. Several months have passed, a phone has been released, 2 software updates have trickled down the pipeline, and no such Mecca has taken place. While there can be much speculation can take place as to why this has (or has not) occurred, I shall stick by the lack of updates and hardware as justification for why Android is still largely in the hangar and hasn’t taken off yet.
However there is are a slurry of developers who promote promoting cross platform applications. Earlier we spoke about the Rhodes platform and its offer of $10,000 to get programmers to use their software. Now, I introduce Phone Gap. While they aren’t offering a large monetary sum, this platform seems to be showing the most promise out of the ones I’ve seen so far. Although still a work in progress, the platform offers support for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry devices.
From the Phone Gap site:
| iPhone | Android | Blackberry | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geo Location | yes | yes | yes |
| Vibration | yes | yes | pending |
| Accelerometer | yes | yes | pending |
| Sound | yes | yes | pending |
| Contact Support | yes | pending | pending |
While I reserve final judgment for when I write an application for multiple phones with this software, it seems to be worth taking a look at. Applications are created using a combination of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript (Watch out Palm!). In addition to self-touted ease of development, there is already a good support framework in place consisting of
Checking their list of aplications, it seems like the platform has been mostly used for iPhone development, though some promise is shown by the fact that the latest release comes with the tag “Support for Android with HTML5″.
If anyone out there is using this platform, I’d like to hear from you!
