What are the best tools to use

purerandom

hi I am a asp.net\c# developer and I am planning on starting to upskill in mobile app development.
What are the best tools, and would Java be the industry standard language to develop mob apps or is C# a contender?
Is visual studio 2010 the defacto tool or is there another tool that the mob dev community leverage?
any comments are welcome.

The Corinthian

Mobile apps for what is the first thing you need to answer?

Second is what type of mobile apps? Games (if so 2D, 3D, etc), business applications, content driven apps, or what?

purerandom

Apologies. thanks for pointing that out.
I am hoping to create Android apps for business apps which will have a backend.
out of interest is there a possibility to create an app that works on Android iOS and Windows Phone?

The Corinthian

purerandom wrote: »

I am hoping to create Android apps for business apps which will have a backend.

I'd reccomend, in that case that you go native, which means Java, which should not be a big problem for someone with C#.

out of interest is there a possibility to create an app that works on Android iOS and Windows Phone?

Unless you develop all three seperately and natively, then there are a number of frameworks that you could try, some of which employ Mono/C#, and can be compiled into packages that will run on the different devices.

Which one is best depends on numerous factors, that really would require a lot research, TBH. For example, one is Unity, which allows coding in C# and can produce for WP8, Android and iOS, but it's more geared towards 3D game development, so I wouldn't go for that. Budget is also a factor, as not all of these are free.

One thing to watch out for is whether your finished app really is an app and not a Web site with an app wrapper - these are typically called hybrid or Web-based apps. This is important because of performance, usability and functionality differences between the two. As they tend to use an instance of the device browser, it also means that you can have fragmentation issues too.

In this area, I'd recommend you start with Google, as there's just too much out there to cover in one thread. If you narrow it down, I'm sure I or someone else could help you further.

The_B_Man

I think I read that Microsoft are introducing the ability to run Android and iOS apps in Windows 10 devices.

As for writing the apps themselves, for android you'd want to know Java, and use Android Studio.
For iOS, learn Objective-C (or maybe swift) and use XCode. You can only run XCode on a Mac, so you'll need to buy a Mac.
For Windows Phone, you can use Visual Studio and C#, but you can only run Visual Studio in Windows, so you'll need a PC.

The other option, if you don't want to run OS's in VMs, is the cross-platform tools like PhoneGap, which you can write (as far as I know) in HTML/javascript and they get exported to the other platforms.

purerandom

thanks for the education folks. all useful info.