Multi-platform development faces a number of great challenges today and a high number of developers have been facing the brunt as they either end up ignoring one OS for the other or completely waste their resources on a few platforms.

Creating a device which runs on all platforms is not the easiest thing and the solution to this problem, though not being the best thing possible, is the array of cross-platform tools available to the developers. These tools basically allow the developer or the designer to create applications for multiple platforms like mobiles and tablets without making heavy changes in codebase. These tools not only cut costs but allow the developers to focus on new platforms as well. This way, not only are they able to gain more out of their development process but are able to save time and money too. Mentioned below are a few of the best cross-platform tools available today.

Appcelerator

As the name suggests, this tool is known for accelerating the developmental process and is also one of the most favourite tools in the web industry. Its USP is the Titanium Development Platform, Appcelerator allows the development of native mobile apps with the help of web dev languages like Python, Ruby, HTML and JavaScript. This FOSS offering allows its users an access to 300 social and other APIs. You can also use this cross-platform development tool to customize metrics for actions and store the app data on clouds or other devices. This means that the apps you create using this tool will be able to use the hardware of the devices they run on very easily.

Phone Gap

For the past four years now, Phone Gap has been considered as an important tool for cross-platform app development and its FOSS framework allows you to develop very good mobile apps which can work on different platforms like iOS, Android, Symbian, Blackberry and other major devices. With the development languages being JavaScript and HTML, this tool allows you to access the hardware of the phone like the camera and sound, and also lets you have access to Adobe AIR app which is a cross-platform stimulator. All these features and its popularity make Phone Gap an important tool for cross-platform development.

RhoMobile

Their tagline ‘One code base, Every Smartphone’ is self explanatory and its features cannot justify it better. This Ruby-based framework also known as Rhodes, allows the development of native apps for a number of mobile devices like the Android and other operating systems. These devices include Smartphones, iPhone, Windows mobiles and other devices. You can write codes and then use it to develop apps which will run on multiple devices and also, get access to the hardware so that the native app you create is able to take full advantage of the internal features to make the experience better. Apart from this, RhoMobile offers RhoHub and RhoSync, which are hosted development environment and stansdalone server respectively, which helps in keeping data updated.

MoSync

Being another FOSS based cross-platform development tool, MoSync allows a framework which supports all the major platforms like Android, Symbian, Windows and Moblin. The compatibility with iPhone and Blackberry is yet to come and is set to be integrated this year. This tool is based on SDK common programming standards which include compilers, runtimes tools and utilities with the languages being JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Python and other languages. An important feature of this tool is an Eclipse-based IDE which is used for C/C++ programming.

These four cross-platform application development tools offer its users a better interface and a number of great programming and developmental features. Using these will help you in developing exceptional apps with cost and time reduction as well.