Top 5 multi-platform mobile app development tools

As per a new study by research firm Gartner, mobile applications downloaded from online stores will be a $58 billion worldwide business by 2014. Driven by the popularity of the iPhone and Android operating system, the demand for skilled app developers is reaching the highest point ever. The days are gone when organizations used to choose either iPhone or android or others platforms and ignore the rest. Today, it's becoming evident that you got to have your app ready for cross platforms. Here comes the significance of multi-platform app development tools. Each platform is unique and exhibits different features, capabilities and behaviour. Here is a list of the top 5 development tools for cross-formatting mobile applications.

1. RhoMobile

RhoMobile offers Rhodes, which is an open-source framework based on Ruby. This permits the developer to create native apps, spanning over a stunning range of OS' and smartphones. The OS' include Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, iPhone and RIM. The developer just need to code once, which can be used to build apps for most of the major smartphones. Apart from Rhodes, RhoMobile also offers developers RhoHub, which is a hosted development environment, and RhoSync, which can be employed as a standalone server to keep all the app data current on the users' handhelds.

2. Appcelerator

Appcelerator is a free and open source application development platform. The Titanium Development Platform from Appcelerator lets you create native mobile, tablet and desktop application experiences using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP. It now powers over a 1,000 native apps per month. The best thing about Titanium is that if gives users easy access to over 300 APIs and location information. Apps can be totally hardware-based and all app data can be stored either in the cloud or on the device. Platforms include iOS, Android based mobiles and tablets.

3. appMobi

appMobi's mobile technology starts with the XDK, a cross-platform native app development tool that addresses ten times as many potential developers as native development tools. Unlike native tools, the XDK uses standard web languages HTML (and HTML5), CSS, and JavaScript to create native apps for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets (with more devices coming soon).

4. PhoneGap

PhoneGap is a HTML5 app platform that allows developers to create apps for Android, Palm, Symbian, BlackBerry, iPhone, iTouch and iPad devices. allows the developer to work with device hardware features such as accelerometer, GPS/location, camera, sound and much more. It also offers an Adobe AIR app and also online training courses to help the developer access native API's and build mobile apps on its own platform.

5. MoSync

MoSync is another Free Open Source Software (FOSS) multi-platform mobile app development tool that offers the developer multi-platform mobile app dev SDK tool. It also includes Eclipse-based IDE for C/C++ programming. MoSync offers support for several types of OS', including Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian, Moblin and even a mobile Linux distro. Support for the iPhone OS and BlackBerry is also on its way.
The list is certainly not exhaustive. Adding to the above five tools, there are some other cross-platform mobile development tools as well that are in huge demand. Some of these skills are - WidgetPad, Whoop, TotalCross and DragonRAD.