Creating a cross-platform smartphone app isn’t easy. It takes lots of work to port a single game or other app to the hundreds of different cell phones and carriers in the world.
Various attempts to make this easy have their pitfalls. But London-based Ideaworks Labs says it has solved the problem with its Airplay software development kit. It launched its fourth version of the software in October, and today it is adding a version for Mac-based developers. That should beef up the competition in the race to create mobile apps that run on all sorts of phones.
The Mac news is interesting, but this kind of company is getting a lot more interesting these days and we haven’t written about Airplay before. It’s more interesting today because there are lots of mobile platforms emerging. Developers need to create different apps that run on the different platforms, and that takes a lot of work. They’re better off if someone like Ideaworks Labs creates a way to develop cross-platform apps. Normally, porting to new platforms can drive development costs up by 20 percent to 50 percent.
The basic pitch is that if you develop an app for the iPhone, you may reach an audience of 65 million or so at the most. If you develop the app with Airplay, you can get your app to half a billion phones. You write the code once for the ARM processor used in most phones. Then the code is natively translated — with a single click — to other platforms, including iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BREW and Maemo devices. And once the Apple iPad comes out, Ideaworks Labs expects to be able to support that platform too.
Ideaworks Labs says its native translation is the key part. The Java programming environment, embodied in the J2ME development platform, allows apps to be translated through a software layer to other platforms. But the performance isn’t necessarily as good. The problem with translating a game designed for one phone to another is that there are usually differences in things like touch screens, tilt controls, screen sizes and such.
Ideaworks faces rivals that are doing the same thing. Moblyng can take smartphone games and natively translate them in a small number of days to run on the iPhone, web sites, Google’s Android platform, the Palm Pre, Nokia S60, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phones. Real Networks also says it can take code for a game and natively export it to 1,700 cell phones using its Emerge developer platform. Ideaworks Labs hasn’t yet answered why it can do a better job than those companies, but Bryce Johnstone, vice president of marketing, says its focus is on creating high-performance cross-platform apps.
Ideaworks Labs has been around for a while. It was founded in 1998 and early forms of the Airplay platform were used in Nokia’s failed N-Gage and N-Gage 2 mobile game platforms. Johnstone said that a number of big developers such as Konami, Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts have licensed the Airplay SDK. Investors include ARM, the company that designs the processor cores that are used in most of the computing chips used in cell phones today.
“The big problem for developers today is fragmentation,” Johnstone said. “This is about getting native, cross-platform and high performance.”
Developers with annual revenues under $50,000 can use Airplay for iPhone game development for free and deploy to all platforms for $99 per seat per year. License fees for bigger companies are higher.