Going mobile

I’ve been asked by a few people if I’m going to offer to develop “apps” for either the iPhone, Google’s Android phones, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile phones or the Blackberry.

I would love to but there are a few stumbling blocks:

• All the systems are different.  You cannot develop one program and it work on them all so that’s four times the development time.
• Each uses a different programming language, so you can’t just copy the code between each and tweak it.
• I need a mac to develop iPhone apps and buying a £1,000 for a mac when the equivalent PC costs a lot less is not going to happen.

It’s simpler and quicker to develop an app that runs on a website and make sure the website looks good on all these phones than to develop an app for each.  Take the booking system fir New Generation Ski School, it runs on all the phones and when I need to make an update (which we do frequently to add in new features) I only have to do it once and people using the site don’t have to download an update to their phone each and every time.

Which is another problem with phone “apps”, the update process and making sure everyone is using the right software.  What a nightmare.

Of course apps are “in” at the moment, apps are what people want and if they’re willing to pay 99p to make their phone fart then fair enough but I’ll stick with doing stuff on the web for now.

Of course, it’s much easier to charge for an app than for a website but they are the breaks.

 

Unless you want to buy me a mac that is!