Over a year ago, we posted a round-up of DIY mobile development tools entitled “13 Tools for Building Your Own iPhone App,” which has been one of our long-standing top posts of all time. Clearly, there’s interest in this area.
But focusing on just “DIY” tools for just the iPhone platform is an outdated way of looking at mobile development, if we do say so ourselves. Android, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, Symbian and other platforms are now important considerations too, as is the mobile Web itself. Plus, there is a wide range of services supporting mobile development all the way from DIY kits up to developer-friendly, cross-platform SDKs.
This week, we’ve rounded up over 30 services which aid in mobile app development. And now we want to know which ones you would have used, too.
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Mobile App Development, Services and Tools
One of the problems with the original post is that it simply wasn’t comprehensive enough. Commenters quickly reminded us of critical services we missed, even though all weren’t “DIY”-type tools. As the year went on, we were contacted from time-to-time by companies begging us to add them to the original list of 13.
Obviously, it was time for an update. But what’s the best way to update a static list like this without falling into the same trap as before? Crowd-sourcing, of course!
We created a Google Spreadsheet with the original 13, added to it the other services we knew of, then publicly shared it on the Web. We posted to sites like Twitter, mentioned it in various blog posts here and sent it out via email to companies who had asked for the post to be updated. The end result is an incredibly useful public Google Doc which everyone can view, edit and share as needed. (Don’t worry, we have a backup copy in case someone gets crazy in there. Let us know.)
At any given moment, there are over 1,000 people accessing this file these days and, as of the time of writing, it includes 33 services in total. We expect that number may climb after this blog post is published.
Take the (BIG!) Poll
But now we’re curious about one more thing: which services have you actually used? And what were your experiences? We would love to hear from you in this week’s poll here on ReadWriteMobile.
Yes, it’s a big one! You can vote more than once and write in your own answers, too. And please share your feedback in the comments regarding which services you would or would not recommend to others.
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