An average US citizen has 1.57 mobile devices, which means there are about 354 million mobile devices in US alone. And the story of rest of the world is even more fascinating, as the average stands there is 1.85 devices per person. And all of these gadgets are not running on any single platform, as plethora of mobile platforms is there in the industry. Many developers thus feel a difficulty while developing the apps for these gadgets which is compatible with all these platforms. iOS, Android and RIM are most popular amongst them, but all of them has a limitation of compatibility as an app developed for a particular platform does not support another one.
To eliminate this restriction, a new kid has just made its appearance in the market in its beta version. Codename One is the name of the platform that is recently launched by the Israeli startup Codename One. It is a unique platform that allows the java developers to develop a single native app which is compatible for multiple operating systems. The developers will need to create a single code base and it will run on different operating systems with same compatibility. The mobile apps development industry has taken the new OS right handedly and it has recorded more than 100,000 downloads in very short span of time.
More than a thousand native apps have been created so far using this platform. Keeping the lack of mobile apps development platforms in mind, the Co-founder Shai Almog and Chen Fishbein decided to launch the platform which is compatible with different kind of mobile devices. The main target of the company was to reduce the cost and time taken in app development for different platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows 7 Phone and Blackberry.
It is an open source platform and using lightweight technology is the biggest feature of the platform. Most of the competitive platforms existing in the market use heavyweight technology, predominantly HTML5. It, instead of using native widgets, draws all components from scratch. This helps developers to avoid fragmentation and also provide precise desktop simulation of mobile apps.
As the number of mobile devices is increasing very rapidly, it creates a need of mobile app development with a faster pace. The platform like Codename One in such may turn out to be a big relief for the developers who are looking for to jump in on the trend.
