[JonQCoder]

The company that was doing the development for my boss's iPhone and Android apps dropped the university he's a head at, so he's dropped it in my lap. The apps were written in Titanium. The iPhone app works as it should...but the android app is quite frankly a POS. Doesn't work for most droid users. I have been learning Xcode and Objective C due to our iPad app being in development, but don't know much about android development other than it's Java based. My guess is that with Titanium you base it on one of the platforms then implement the measures necessary to make the app run on the other correctly.

I've installed titanium and the latest android sdk, but it's..really been a hassle just getting it configured and it seems as though if it's not configured perfectly, it won't work. (Installing all of the android sdk's/api's to see if it fixes that problem). It also seems..laggy and if your app is reasonably complex you run into issues and weird bugs. I've only looked at it briefly, so can't say much else. My question is, would it just be easier in the long run to switch to native development(Xcode and Objective C/Java)? Java was one of the first languages I learned so I wouldn't be learning it all from scratch. The bulk of the app work is done via a webservice and the actual app is just displaying the returned JSON data and saving some smaller things like bookmarks locally. We also already have all of the graphics and such, So I would just have to move the app from Titanium's language(Javascript) to the native languages and structure.

Seems like switching to native would be more reliable and maintainable long term, but short term it would be a loss(Not that the android app is working anyways).

Thanks for your advice/suggestions. />

[bgammill]

If you can quickly optimize some of the problems you're having with Titanium, I would stick with that. There's no reason to move your entire codebase if you can easily do it another way. So long as Titanium isn't discontinued, you'll probably save time in the long run. Developing apps on different platforms isn't easy, so something that does the abstraction for you is a big plus.

If you're doing something as simple as calling a web service, your app shouldn't be lagging very much. Keep in mind that Android device hardware varies; so don't expect your app to run like butter on a four year old phone.

[JonQCoder]

Thanks for the reply. We went ahead and stuck with Titanium and it's going well. Testing on an actual device eliminated most of the problems getting started.(I guess the emulator isn't all that great?)

[bgammill]

JonQCoder, on 10 April 2013 - 08:11 AM, said:

Thanks for the reply. We went ahead and stuck with Titanium and it's going well. Testing on an actual device eliminated most of the problems getting started.(I guess the emulator isn't all that great?)

Glad everything worked out. The Android virtual device is notoriously slow.