No doubt, mobile is huge. With more than 700,000 mobile apps in the Apple App Store and as many in the Google Play Store, mobile computing has demonstrated impressive growth. According to a Gartner survey, 61% of CIOs plan to enhance their mobility capability during the next three years. However, some (particularly small) businesses are still hesitant developing and implementing a mobile strategy. A common concern has to do with the fragmentation of mobile platforms. Even if you focus on the two major systems, iOS and Android, which cover about 85% of smartphones and over 95% of tablets, you still have to master two separate worlds with quite different programming languages (Objective-C and Java), IDEs (Xcode and Eclipse+Android SDK) and APIs; not to mention specific requirements in order to comply with the terms and conditions of the corresponding app store. This leads to little or no code-reuse and, in the worst case scenario, complete recoding for each platform you want to support. With Windows Phone 8 (.NET) as a potential third big player, this doesn’t help ease the situation either.
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