Lotte Card, a credit card company from South Korea, has come up with a solution to the struggle faced by mobile app developers that has limited them to the choice of either developing apps that function over multiple platforms or coming up with a sophisticated custom app – but not both.
Though mobile apps are already possible for multi-platform use, one of the most significant problems that are faced with their development is that there was a limit to the sophistication that was possible for apps that would function across more than one platform. Therefore, developers could either come up with a custom app for each major platform for mobile devices, or they would be limited to a less-capable app that would work through the browser of the device but would function on any platform used by the device.
Lotte Card programmers worked with Worklight, a mobile application platform and a number of standard tools (such as JavaScript, CSS and HTML5) in order to write hundreds of pages in HTML before wrapping them up in codes native to Android and iOS so that the bundles that resulted could be offered to other programmers and developers by way of the app stores at Apple and Android, in the same way that any other app would be sold.
This way, the multi-platform benefits of using web apps can still be used, but the same limitations are not necessary. Like other native apps, this new form of programming allows multi-platform apps to access device features such as the address book or camera, as well as native user-interface elements that are unique to the platform in use. Moreover, these new apps can use the device browser to grab web content.
