Top 5 Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development Tools

In the modern age of technology, smartphones play a major role in making our life easy. Other than everyday use, businesses use innovative mobile apps to increase their sales and to communicate easily with their clients all around the world. However, while smartphone vendors continue to release new devices, mobile application developers have to work on different challenges faced during the course of development; such as Screen sizes, mobile platforms, resolution, mobile OS etc.

To overcome the pressure on developers to provide unique concepts in every new app for as many Operating systems introduced in the market, Cross-Platform mobile development comes to place. Cross-platform refers to a framework for mobile application development that allows developers to code an app only once and run it on multiple mobile platforms. Utilizing the advantages of different tools for cross-platform development, developers can create applications in a better way.

The five best cross-platform mobile app development tools are:

1.  Rho Mobile

Formally known as Rhodes framework, RhoMobile is widely used by developers to create native smartphone applications. It is an open source framework based on Ruby and allows mobile application development for different platforms like iPhone, RIM, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Android. Moreover, RhoMobile offers an outstanding hosted development environment called RhoHub, which maintains updated data on the user’s smartphone. This tool gives full control over how applications function in different mobile operating systems.

2. PhoneGap

This is the most preferred cross platform development tool for developing apps for various operating systems like Symbian, Android, Palm, iPad, Blackberry, iTouch and iPhone devices. Based on the latest web development technologies like Java, HTML5, Script, CSS3 and others, PhoneGap makes mobile application development easier for web developers. Throughout the development, programmers can conveniently work on hardware components like accelerometer, camera, GPS, sound etc.

3. Titanium

Appcelerator Titanium is one of the most suitable cross development tools for development of native desktop, mobile and tablet apps, using different programming languages like PHP, Ruby, HTML, Python, and JavaScript. Over 1,000 Titanium developed apps are introduced in the market on a monthly basis. One of the most prominent features of Titanium apps is that users can access over 300 APIs and location information, and can also customize the metrics for events and actions based on specific needs. Titanium based development supports only hardware-based apps that can be stored on the device or in the cloud.

4. Sencha Touch

Sencha Touch serves as an excellent user interface framework that enables developers to create HTML5 based mobile applications, as well as native apps via standard web programming languages like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. It supports robust mobile application development for major mobile platforms; Windows, Android, iPhone and Blackberry.

5. WidgetPad

This is another tool for cross platform smartphone applications development that is done through HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3. WidgetPad supports debugging, project management, source code editing, versioning and distribution. It is compatible with multiple operating systems like Android, WebOS, iOS etc.