Our “favorite” mobile platforms

Active marketing campaigns of Samsung, Apple, Research In Motion, Google and others creates more and more increasing demand for freshly new phones and therefore a need in relevant applications. But how many of those who want to move their apps to a new platform know that development cost of the same app on different platforms might vary in several times?
Here is nothing, but professional complains on those platforms we have been struggling with for a longer period because of their “raw” state or low organizational level of its producers.

BADA:

• Not many standard components exist yet, many controls should be written from scratch
• Many difficulties with getting approval from Samsung for a ready application; approval rules are changed frequently; what was allowed yesterday might not be allowed tomorrow
• Many limitations of the platform cause limited functionality of applications e.g. problems in augmented reality, multitasking, etc.

Result: development cost is about 2-3 times higher than for Android or iPhone.

Blackberry:

• Simulator and device behavior almost always differ
• API is not well-thought, no normal layout manager, just a couple of primitives
• there is no real API for work with browser
• For every version of device/OS developers have to compile app separately, otherwise it crashes, for example when it can’t find the class which might be not needed on execution device
• Development environment is quite complicated – several JDE versions are required, a whole bunch of simulators, integration of all this with Eclipse (native JDE is almost unusable) and one has to buy signature keys from Blackberry on top.
• Every application signing attempt is followed by email from Blackberry, so get ready for heavy spamming during development process

Result: the same as for BADA
These complains for no extend should be considered as a demotivator to write apps on these platforms. Investments are higher and development lasts longer than for applications on another popular phones, but from the other hand, there are not many competitors yet on this market because of development difficulties. So if you really feel your app is worth of these efforts – challenge it!
P.S. what apps do you like?

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