Lately, I’ve been in a mobile-app-development phase. I have a couple of ideas for some mobile apps and wanted the easiest way to develop them. Here are the current possibilities:
- 100% Native
You can build a native mobile app that looks great and performs well but you have to develop in the language required by the platform. iOS uses Objective-C. Android uses Java. And Microsoft and others use other languages. - 90% Native
You can build mobile apps for many platforms (iOS, Android, etc) using just Javascript if you use the Appcelerator Titanium SDK. The SDK provides a bridge to over 3000 native commands so your apps look like native apps and perform almost just as well. eBay’s mobile app uses Appcelerator Titanium and this is my preferred choice. - 10% Native
You can build a mobile app using HTML, CSS, and Javascript which is basically a small website. This website then gets wrapped using PhoneGap which turns it into an app. PhoneGap also provides hooks into 10 or so device features such as the accelerometer, geolocation, camera, etc. While this is probably the easiest approach, it would be difficult to make your app look like a native app and it would be even more difficult to make it perform like one.