Mobile application development
Mobile application development is the process by which applications are developed for hand held devices such as personal digital assistants, enterprise digital assistants or mobile phones. These applications are either pre-installed on phones during manufacture, or downloaded by customers from app stores and other mobile software distribution platforms.
There are many platforms that a developer can choose for his/her application. Each of these are mostly mutually incompatible (that is, an application developed on one platform will not run on another) and furthermore each handheld device only supports one particular platform.
Therefore to maximize reach and revenue for their applications, a developer must decide carefully which platforms they will support.
Since the first handheld computers of the 1980s, the popularity of these platforms has risen considerably. Many cellphone models of the late 2000s include the ability to run user-installed software.
Platforms for a single manufacturer’s devices
BlackBerry Supports push e-mail, mobile telephone, text messaging, internet faxing, web browsing and other wireless information services as well as a multi-touch interface. It has a built-in QWERTY keyboard, optimized for “thumbing”, the use of only the thumbs to type. The BlackBerry devices soon took a dominating position on the North American smartphone market. Also important for BlackBerry are the BES (Black Berry Enterprise Server) and the Mobile Data System (BlackBerry MDS).
iPhone OS The iPhone and iPod Touch SDK uses Objective C, based on the C programming language. Currently, is only available on Mac OS X 10.5 and is the only way to write an iPhone application. All applications must be cleared by Apple before being hosted on the AppStore, the sole distribution channel for iPhone and iPod touch applications. However, non-Apple approved applications can be released to jailbroken iPhones via Cydia or Installer. The iPhone OS is being renamed to iOS with the release of version 4.
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