[dlking]

There appears to be many languages with which to program downloadable mobile Apps. I'm looking for direction on the best to use for multi-platform mobile apps that can be tied to a PHP or Wordpress website collected version of the Apps.

[bgammill]

I'd like to preface this post with an apology to the moderators. Sorry for bumping a three-month-old post.

According to Google, the most popular mobile operating system is Android. If you choose to go that route, you'll be using Java. The only time you'd use anything else would be if you were to develop native Android applications using C/C++. There are a couple of solid game development engines at your disposal should you choose Android. My personal favorite is libgdx. It has an active community associated with it, and is fairly straightforward to learn. One of the best features is that your game will be cross platform (Android/iOS/HTML5). Another popular one is AndEngine. I chose not to use it because their community seems to be dead and their documentation is lacking.

To answer the last part of your question, you can easily interact with PHP applications using native Android and/or the game engine of your choice. I personally have developed an application that calls a PHP script that returns JSON.

Hope this helps!