Cross-platform app development is more important than ever. 10 years ago, you just whipped out your Visual Studio when you needed a client application, but not anymore. With "app-ification" going mainstream on Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac, what is a developer to do?
Web apps are a good solution some of the time (except for that little detail called IE!).
But what about when you need the features and performance of native code, across platforms? And you're a startup with a small team and impossible deadlines?
Well, at MobileSpan we've been living in this world for the past 2 years, and we want to share our approach.
We chose to build our application by integrating with the source code of Chromium.
Chromium is the open-source base of Google Chrome. My co-founder and I are Xooglers from the Chrome team, so we were very familiar with it and it was an easy choice for us. But you don't have to spend 4 years at Google to take advantage of Chrome's rich code base.
But... I'm not building a browser!
So, why would Chrome source be useful to me for cross-platform app development? I'm not building a browser...
In reality, Chrome is much more than just a browser. Chrome code is highly tuned for performance, reliability, and cross-platform compatibility across PCs and iOS + Android devices.
Out of necessity, the Chrome team has created cross-platform abstractions for many low-level platform features. We use this source as the core API on which we build our business logic, and it's made the bulk of our app cross-platform with little effort.
Most importantly -- Chrome code has been battle-tested like almost nothing else, with an installed base in the hundreds of millions. That makes all the difference when you want to spend your days working on your company's business logic instead of debugging platform issues.
Basically, you can structure your code like the diagram below, where you only write your application logic, and let Chromium do the heavy lifting.
Read more: MobileSpan