Cross-platform mobile development

Question

There are many cross-platform mobile development platforms. The main platforms, all mutually exclusive:

• iOS (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch)
• Android
• Blackberry
• Windows mobile
• Windows Phone 7
• Symbian
• MeeGo (a merger of Maemo and Moblin)
• WebOS

There are also many different infrastructures for mobile applications that support various arrays of smartphone platforms, including, but not limited to:

• Rhodes
• ELIPS
• RAMP
• Titanium
• Phonegap
• MoSync
• rotation
• Bedrock
• Qt

Qt is an excellent platform for developing cross-platform desktop applications, and also takes care of several mobile platforms - Windows Mobile, Symbian, MeeGo. There are community ports for iOS and Android (and webOS?). Blackberry and WP7 are now at your own peril and risk.

MoSync also looks good, supporting a large number of platforms, including Java-based, from C ++. However, this is not well known by AFAIK and has its problems.

So my question is: is it really worth using a cross-platform platform for mobile development? Everyone I found has one flaw or another that makes it unusable.

At least if Qt supports iOS and Android, you will need no more than three versions of the application to support all platforms (Qt, Blackberry and WP7). The community ports that are around are not well supported, although they are far from complete. In addition, even if they are completed, will they ever support them anyway or will this be considered a bad business strategy?

Should I just bite the bullet and write the native ports for each smartphone platform? Qt + iOS + Android + WP7 + Blackberry + webOS? 5-6 versions of the application are quite a lot to support, but solutions for cross-platform development on smartphones do not look great right now.

Answer 1

UPDATE . By popular request, the link to the Qt 5.2 release is the Android support page , as it is now officially integrated and "ready for production".

---

Well, Qt can support Android, through the recently integrated Lighthouse internal project and the work of a separate developer who is likely to be busy integrating his code into Qt code:

• http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/

• http://tamss60.tamoggemon.com/2010/03/18/qt-on-android-the-bogdan-vatra-interview/

• http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2010/10/29/lighthouse-is-integrated/

Expect to see Qt 4.8 with Android support through Lighthouse.

iOS has a similar engine, but projects are just beginning:

http://forums.internettablettalk.com/showthread.php?p=865264#post865264

The beacon provides a tiny layer of abstraction for gui / core Qt operations, providing a very simple way to port the frame.

Answer 2

Another open source Kivy board

Answer 3

V-Play (v-play.net). This is a cross-platform game engine based on Qt / QML. ( API link ) It already supports iOS, Android, Symbian and MeeGo. Support for BlackBerry and Windows Phone will be added soon.

Answer 4

Here you can find almost all the tools for cross-platform development - http://www.riaxe.com/blog/top-cross-platform-mobile-development-tools/

Answer 5

Blackberry now supports QT, so you only need to write two versions. See http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=5230

Answer 6

It seems that mobile web development converges in pure html5 / javascript, unless the inline code provides a significant performance boost.

Last night, I attended the Hyves Dev team presentation in my cross-platform mobile app. Some graphically intensive features (animated emoticons, this is a social website) are disabled on slower platforms. They use Phonegap to fill in the blanks.

Answer 7

This is obviously a subjective question - you are asking us to guess Nokia’s business strategy.

However, my own guess is that Nokia will not port Qt to iOS, but the community (in fact, the work has already begun). I suspect that the port for android is much simpler than the port for iOS, and this will happen soon.

But then again, this is just an assumption.

Why not include your energy in helping port Qt on these new platforms?

Qt for Android project

Qt for iPhone project

Answer 8

There are some that are not on your list that might be worth mentioning ... JUCE , Corona, and Moai . All of them support iOS and Android. Crown is mainly intended for games, but also pushes to the general application area - and it has a very active community. Moai is primarily intended for games and interactive graphics. Moai and Corona are for Lua scripts. JUCE is an elegant and well-structured library of user interfaces on the C ++ platform.