Titanium Duel Development

Earlier this month, I was able to go to the Mobile March (#mmtc11) conference in Minneapolis. There was a lot of good information at the conference, but I especially liked the third-party mobile app platform Titanium.

The biggest benefit of Titanium is the ability to produce apps for both iPhone and Android operating systems at the same time. Titanium uses html/css/js/ruby/python to write the apps, and then builds them into the prospective apps for either platform. Of course, there’s some Titanium specific code to learn, but you still write only one set of code.

This is not a completely foolproof system. There are times that iPhone and Android need to do things a bit differently, which means you’ll need to do code-specific entries. Since both providers operate differently, you can’t expect one set of code to work in all situations. General web development also faces this issue in cross-browser testing. It’s just one of those things that we need/have to deal with.

Another benefit is that each app is native. I have mentioned in a couple of previous posts that there are web-app options such as jQuery Mobile or jQTouch. These options have quite a few benefits, but they will never be truly native. They can only mimic native options. Titanium allows you to access all the features of each phone system while allowing you use your html/js knowledge.

Is Titanium the end-all answer?  I’m not sure, but it’s worth looking into if you plan on developing your app for more than one system.