appMobi today announced immediate availability of the appMobi Cross Platform Development kit (XDK) that allows developers to use existing web development tools to create native mobile apps. With the XDK, native iPhone, iPad, and Android apps can be created with any tool that can edit web pages – such as DreamWeaver, Eclipse, or Visual Studio.
“There are two forms of fragmentation that are hurting the mobile app industry – fragmentation of the tool sets for creating apps and fragmentation of the target platforms. Developing mobile apps for one platform can be daunting, doing it for more than one platform is a true nightmare,” said appMobi CTO Sam Abadir. “We thought to ourselves, could we make developing native apps as easy as developing web pages? What if developers could choose their favorite tools and write mobile apps in HTML and JavaScript (the most widely used programming languages)? That’s what we’ve delivered in the appMobi XDK.”
The appMobi XDK itself is installable cross-platform so that developers can create native mobile apps using any type of desktop computer – a feat no other development system can claim. With XDK, you can create iPhone apps with a Windows PC, or an Android app with a Mac. The apps produced by the XDK are 100% terms of service-compliant native apps, not web apps.
Unlike other cross-platform development tools, XDK does not require the developer to learn arcane programming languages and APIs to access native device functionality like accelerometer and GPS. The appMobi XDK provides a bridge between standard WebKit browser controls and native device functionality and is infinitely extensible to add support for any device-specific hardware, or third-party software API. The XDK’s leverage of the cloud further enables rapid prototyping because apps under development can be instantly shared with clients and reviewers – either in the client’s XDK emulator or on the appMobi preview container installed on mobile devices. The appMobi XDK is available for free download at http://www.appmobi.com.
