Cross-platform mobile development

Abstract

The popularity of smartphones has paved way for a new class of applications tailored for mobile platforms. In order to cover as large market as possible, it is desirable for developers to produce software that work on as many different smartphone platforms as possible. A problem is that different platforms commonly do not support the same programming languages and frameworks, making it difficult to share the implementation across platforms. This thesis focuses on how to develop applications for the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7 platforms, while sharing a large part of the implementation. In order to meet the objectives of the thesis two studies were conducted. The first study investigates how the development environment for the mobile platforms looks like, and the second one explores how to share as much of the implementation as possible. Finally a prototype application has been developed. This report describes how the development of the application was conducted, which techniques that are used and what problems were discovered during the development.