The following blog post is an article originally published in the most current issue of "The Developer", a magazine distributed to Norwegian developers. The article discusses the exciting possibility to use C# and .NET across the three major smart phone platforms WP7, iOS and Android. Since the magazine is only distributed in Norway I decided to post it on my blog as well. You can either read it here, or download a PDF version of the article as presented in the magazine.
If you ask me 2010 was the year of the mobile app. Everyone was talking about them, from consumers around the lunch table, to CEOs in the boardrooms. It was like 1999 all over again; only this time it was not about building websites, but to have some kind of offering in one of the major mobile app stores. According to the analysts at IDG the huge interest in mobile apps is not just a fad. They expect download numbers to grow from 10.9 billion in 2010 to 76.9 billion in 2014. As a result app revenue will surpass $35 billion the same year. In short, mobile is going to play an important role for software developers over the next few years.
As a .NET developer you are faced with some tough decisions. Which platform do you bet on? How do you get your skills up-to-date quickly enough? Do you suck it up and learn CocoaTouch and Objective-C to target the popular Apple iOS devices? Should you learn Java and go for the Android? Or should you skip two of the most popular mobile platforms and stick to C# and develop for the newly released Windows Phone 7?
Businesses face some of the same decisions, as they need to decide where to focus their resources and efforts. Should they target all the major platforms, or focus only on iOS devices? What will be the cost of maintaining these applications over time? A quick search for “DnB NOR” (Norway’s largest financial services group) in the iTunes App Store reveals that they already have five apps available. This is for iOS devices alone. In addition, two of the applications are also available in Android Market. With seven apps published already one can start to imagine what the cost and technical challenges of maintaining them over time will be.
When choosing which technology to use for implementing mobile apps, the popular choices have traditionally been either web-based apps written in HTML, CSS & JavaScript, or alternatively fully native apps tailored to a specific platform. Both alternatives have their pros and cons. Web-based applications might be quicker to build and easier to make cross-platform, but the drawback is that you do not have full access to the phone specific APIs. And it is harder to provide the same high fidelity user experience as a native app offers. With native apps, the challenge might be a steep learning curve and having to re-implement the same app across different platforms.
Read more: JONAS FOLLESØ
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