The New Cross-Platform

Over the years, the term “cross-platform” has picked up a lot of baggage. Developers have seen solutions like J2ME fail to deliver on the run-anywhere promise. But more than that, “cross-platform” has to some developers acquired an association of “lowest-common-denominator”… an approach suitable for quick-and-dirty apps, but one that ultimately lowers quality.

Today, cross-platform tools that take a lowest-common-denominator approach will see little developer adoption. The platforms and services landscape is being driven aggressively by multiple forces: OEMs and OS vendors rapidly iterating their platforms in an attempt to differentiate, and 3rd party services (ads, billing, recommendations, notifications…) looking to discover the next great monetisation opportunity. Cross-platform tools must allow developers to access native OS APIs and 3rd party libraries, as they simply cannot hope to roll all of these features into their core products fast enough.

That’s why we’re so excited about Marmalade’s EDK (Extensions Development Kit). The EDK lets you access any native OS API you choose, or wrap any 3rd party static library, and the functionality is linked into your app at deployment time. The EDK is initially supported on iOS, Android and Windows desktop… but we’ll be extending it to other platforms as soon as we can.

We’ve just launched the Marmalade Code Community where we’ll be encouraging developers to upload EDK modules they’ve created. That way, the whole community can work together to tap into new OS features and services… we’re looking forward to seeing what you will create!