Android and iPhone Application Development

Mobile app development is the umbrella under which the android and iPhone application development is accomplished. Mobile app development is the process of developing an application for a mobile device or any digital system. It can be done on number of platforms according to the users’ demand and utility. The most commonly used applications are either android based or iOS. However, the process of an application development is similar for any platform. It includes a step by step procedure of identifying the problem and then designing a solution to it. When a well planned layout of an application is completed, the task of the coding comes into action. This requires the development tool kits that vary for different platforms. Here, the demarcation between the android and iphone app development comes in to picture.

In android app development, the application code is written in C++, JAVA or kotlin computer languages using the software development kit. The SDK is supported on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS but not for the android platform itself. There are a few third party development tools and development environment available for the development of android app. The Android Software Development Kit is a set of tools essential for developing the application. It consists of a debugger, libraries, a handset emulator that enables the host system to run software or use peripheral devices designed for the guest system. The emulator is based on QEMU (Quick Emulator) which is used for running virtual machines.  Another software development kit includes the Android NDK (Native development Kit). It is written in C, C++ but the native libraries can be called from JAVA codes too. The third party tools and environment for development of android applications are Corona SDK, Kivy, and Delphi etc. Corona lets the developers build graphic applications by using its integrated Lua language, which is layered on top of C++/OpenGL. Similarly, Delphi can also be used for creating Android application in the Object Pascal language.

iOS, the operating system of iphone is the second most popular mobile operating system in the world, after Android. The iOS software development kit allows for the development of mobile apps on iOS operating system of Apple Inc. It is free for download to the Mac Users and it is not available for Microsoft users. The SDK contains sets that provide access to various functions and services of iOS devices, such as hardware and software features. It also includes an iPhone simulator to impersonate the look and feel of the device on the computer while developing. The new versions of the SDK accompany new versions of iOS. The iOS SDK combined with Xcode helps developers write the iOS apps using officially supported programming languages, including Swift and Objective-C. JAVA and .NET are also used for development of the application through virtual machines.

The deployment and testing process of android and iphoneapplication have a slightly different procedure. The iOS app has to be approved by apple store before being made available on the app store. This process takes time and several resubmissions at times. While the android application can be first launched on Google Play beta app store for the test run and then can be finally made available on this Google Play Store on successful running on Beta store.