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In this age of smart mobile phones one can find a wide variety of phones with a host of them having a separate OS of their own. We have iOS, Android, Bada (Samsung), Symbian, Blackberry, Windows mobile, HP webOS etc to name a few. Since the market is not matured yet – meaning since smart phone is new – so many companies are launching their own products and each have their own set of customers too. So if you are a smart phone app developer you are left unsure as to which technology to go for and build expertise in app development. iOS is the king now but what if Android dominates the market in few years time? Or What if you build expertise in Blackberry thinking it will pick up steam but it does not?

These or similar questions will always bug you since no one wants to be left out. As an app development company also one would face similar dilemma. Some questions like these are to a large extent addressed by cross-platform mobile app development.

Cross-platform mobile development refers to frameworks or platforms as they are called which enable development of apps which can work on any or most of the popular OS available in the market. Given below are 3 good platforms currently available in the market.

RhoMobile – RhoMobile offers Rhodes, an open source, Ruby-based framework that allows for development of native apps for a wide range of Smartphone devices and operating systems. OSes covered include iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, RIM and Symbian.The framework lets you write your code once and use it to quickly build apps for every major Smartphone. Native apps are said to take full advantage of available hardware, including GPS and camera, as well as location data.

Appcelerator – Appcelerator’s Titanium Development Platform allows for the development of native mobile, tablet and desktop applications through typical web dev languages such as JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby and HTML. Titanium also gives its users access to more than 300 social and other APIs and location information. Appcelerator’s offerings also include customizable metrics for actions and events. App data can be stored in the cloud or on the device, and apps can take full advantage of hardware, particularly camera and video camera capability.

PhoneGap – PhoneGap, the recipient of the winning pitch at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco’s 2009 Launch Pad event, is a FOSS framework that helps you develop apps for iPhone, iTouch, iPad, Android, Palm, Symbian and BlackBerry devices using web development languages such as JavaScript and HTML. It also allows for access to hardware features including GPS/location data, accelerometer, camera, sound and more. The company offers a cross-platform simulator (an Adobe AIR app), as well as online training sessions to help you access native APIs and build functioning mobile apps on the PhoneGap platform.

Cross platform application development in India is new but there are companies which are investing heavily in this area and have developed a good high caliber team by virtue of the fact that they were smart enough to figure out it’s potential early and had invested early in building the right skills. Some of these companies have delivered projects which have been highly appreciated by clients.

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