After several years of being part of mobile development (unfortunately not in the IBMi), I know that customers and not market trends are the ones that help you to decide the tool and language to deliver your next mobile app, unless you already have customers that do not really know what they want and one can dictate what and what not be supported according to the market trend.
There is always very native functionalities like taking a picture with the built-in camera, attach images, use GPS, sneak into the call logs and things like that makes you to move to a native language. Sometimes code generators are not just enough for that, they also have a big blueprint that for big/complex mobile applications becomes big problem just because you never know whether all your future customers (or existing clients with devices already in the field waiting for you to release the mobile app) will have top notch mobile devices or they already have crummy devices with exhausted memory and no plans to replace them soon, but they rely on your software to handle the last *put_brand_here* device that they just got.
Yes, it might be that one can condition the sale of the use of the software for top-notch devices only... the sale could also be lost in favor of competition. Nowadays most companies already have devices and it is like a dream to expect that those companies would replace all their devices in a blink of an eye, especially if they have few dozen or hundreds of devices already in operation.
In a more narrowed point of view, I would be in favor of phonegapp or some generator like that if the application is small, it is for not very complex entry data and its whole purpose in life is to query data in a web-browser-like environment.
jmerinoh
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces+jorge=nuvek.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces+jorge=nuvek.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Monday, January 02, 2012 5:06 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Android Development for the IBM i
On 1/2/2012 4:03 PM, Maurice O'Prey wrote:
Joe
I did not suggest that you are incapable of writing IOS apps, of
course you are. You simply seem to have chosen not to and have backed
that up with some of your reasons, well it's your call.
Yup! It is a question of balancing resources with requirements.
I do not see the business case for ignoring an entire (leading) market
segment, maybe you do?
I'll address iPhones with web-based apps. And maybe a generator like PhoneGap will be enough to create platform independent native applications.
But if it comes down to having to learn individual languages and platforms to support different platforms, I'll gladly support Android and drop support for iPhone. Android: open platform, open language (Java), open API. iPhone: closed platform, closed hardware, closed language, closed API. Not a tough decision.
Given infinite resources, perhaps I'd support them all. But given reality, it's Android all the way.
Joe
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