Cross-platform mobile development tools

Developing applications that are functional across multiple operating systems and devices is perhaps the biggest challenge faced by mobile app developers. The reason being, each of these multiple platforms, like Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, RIM and a number of other players, come with their own set of features and capabilities and behavior. While companies cannot afford to lose the audience across other platforms by choosing to build on just one or two, developing and re-developing of applications for each of these platforms imposes severe strains on the their budget and resources. The ideal solution would be a one-time development process for all platforms, so that the time and cost for creation of an app are reduced and the benefits are results are maximized.
Cross-platform mobile development tools
Tools that enable mobile app development across platforms provide an excellent alternative to separate app development for each OS. These tools are said to realize time and cost savings of up to 30%, according to a report by research2guidance. For the first time in the five years these tools have been in existence, their significance is being acknowledged and more and more companies are shifting towards using these tools in their development processes.
Cross-platform Tools Available Today
Xamarin Studio

Xamarin Studio provides a cross-platform IDE for iOS, Android and Mac. It is modern, sophisticated, with a rich editor and advanced debugging and integration features, that make it a preferred candidate with many mobile app developers. What differentiates it from other players in the CPT space is that Xamarin offers development through a single language, C#, which can work across all the major mobile platforms – iOS, Android and Windows Mobile.
Icenium
Telerik's Icenium is an IDE where you can use your HTML5, CSS and JavaScript skills to develop applications for iOS and Android platforms. An Icenium subscription gives you access to three IDEs – Windows client, web client and Visual Studio Extension, so that you can build and deploy apps from wherever you want, whenever you want. This is possible due to the use of Apache Cordova Network, which gives you the convenience of a local coding environment along with cloud based services.
RhoMobile
With Rhodes, an open source Ruby based framework, RhoMobile enables a single development platform for multiple OSes, like Windows, Android, RIM, iOS and Symbian. And then there is also RhoHub, a hosted development environment and RhoSync, a standalone server that looks after data synchronization with the users' devices.
Titanium
Appcelerator's cross-platform development environment, Titanium is perhaps the most favored cross-platform tool among the developers today. Another open source tool, Titanium allows you to develop applications for mobile, tablet and desktop devices using the traditional web development languages such as JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby and HTML. A salient feature of Titanium is that it can provide customizable metrics for actions and events, thus making it ideal for monitoring the usage / popularity of the app, or conducting polls and surveys.
MoSync
This FOSS cross-platform application development SDK incorporates common programming standards by tightly integrating compilers, run time libraries, device profiles and many more. It has an Eclipse based IDE for C/C++ programming, and promises support soon for JavaScript, Python and other languages. The mobile OSes supported are – Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Moblin (Linux based). Support for IOS and RIM are coming soon enough, in the upcoming versions.
Resources:
http://www.research2guidance.com/cross-platform-tool-benchmarking-2013/
http://mashable.com/2010/08/11/cross-platform-mobile-development-tools/
http://docs.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/getting_started/introducing_xamarin_studio/ http://www.icenium.com/

Posted in: Android,HTML5,iOS,Windows