Four Ways To Build A Mobile Application, Part 1: Native iOS

The mobile application development landscape is filled with many ways to build a mobile app. Among the most popular are: native iOS, native Android, PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium. This article marks the start of a series of four articles covering the technologies above. The series will provide an overview of how to build a simple mobile application using each of these four approaches. Because few developers have had the opportunity to develop for mobile using a variety of tools, this series is intended to broaden your scope.

Hopefully, armed with this knowledge, you will be in a better position to choose the right development tools for your mobile application’s needs. In this first article in the series, we’ll start with some background and then dig into iOS.

Peter Traeg has built the same simple application with each technology to demonstrate the basic concepts of development and the differences between the platforms and development tools. The purpose of this series is not to convert you to a particular technology, but rather to provide some insight into how applications are created with these various tools, highlighting some of the common terms and concepts in each environment.