Friday 12 August 2016

Mobile Platform Development for SharePoint 2016

Overview:  There are various options for building Mobile applications.  The simplest answer is to have a fully responsive designed web page and mobile users interact with the application using the mobile devices browser. Another option is to write code for each platform so for example write and iOS application what would be loaded in the AppStore, this requires multiple source codes to be maintained.  An improvement on this approach is to use a tool that creates a version from a single source for multiple stores.  So write once deploy to MS, Android and Apples store; PhoneGap and Xamarin are examples.

Xamarin uses C# code and compiles executable applications for each target mobile store such as iOS, Windows and Android.  Xamerin uses it's own IDE or a add-in for Visual Studio.

PhoneGap is also refereed to as Cordova.  PhoneGap creates the web application using HTML5, CSS & JS and wraps this web application in a plaform control/container.  In effect, the html page is hosted in each platforms executable within a web control.  The exe can interact with the web pages:  


Unity is another development platform probably the 3rd biggest and generally favored for gaming.

Summary:  Responsive Web Design works on the mobile device as a native html app using the mobile browser.  If you need to interact with he phones features and you need to write an application for the platforms store, rather use Cordova/PhoneGap where you write once and distribute to each desired platform.

Updated: 29 August 2016
More Info:
http://magenic.com/documents/Xamarin_PhoneGap_eBook.pdf?EBookTest