Developing Mobile Apps for Multiple Platforms (without a cross-platform framework!) [closed]

Question

We're the developers of a relatively complex non-game iPhone 3 application, and we're beginning an ambitious rewrite to take better advantage of iOS 4. There's a significant social element to the app, so we started thinking that we'd like to make it available on as many modern mobile platforms as possible:

• iPhone/iOS
• Android
• Windows Phone
• BlackBerry OS
• Symbian

There are several approaches to cross-platform development, and they all have limitations. No solution manages to take advantage of all a device's functionality the way a native application can. Given the complexity of our app, I'd simply like to maximize "logical" code reuse without resorting to a cross-platform framework. I'm envisioning tools that will make developing and testing apps against multiple platforms a little more seamless. What can we do to make developing on 5 platforms take less than 5 times the effort?

Answer 1

Push as much of the functionality as you can back to a shared web server, and try to make only the UI specific to the platform.

Answer 2

I know you said no cross-platform frameworks, but perhaps something to look at:

Write all the core logic in javascript. Unit test that at will. Then use tools like Appcelerator to turn that logic into native code.

Then import that logic code into your native platform projects for each of those platforms, and build out the other features you feel can't be achieved properly in any other way.

For platforms they don't support right now, you might be able to find a js to native code converter, or indeed a way of hosting a js environment within those platforms.