MotherApp
I have been following the development of MotherApp since Ken Law, who used to work at Google, first started his own company late last year. I have also been helping Ken with a few platform specific problems. Ken has developed a technology that takes HTML code as input and generates native code as output. It currently works on iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile.
Application development starts with you creating a web site according to MotherApp’s allowed HTML. You submit the site URL to MotherApp and they create an iPhone, Android or Windows Mobile application within one day. MotherApp is a native application generator and the result is a 100% native application with access to phone features such as GPS and camera. Furthermore, the application isn’t a static snapshot of your original site. If your web site data changes (say you are showing latest listings for something), the application will pick this up.
Licensing is USD $1K per platform per app. You only pay when you are happy with the application. There are already several applications on the Android Market and iphone App store that have been generated using MotherApp.
The advantage of MotherApp is that it allows web developers to create native mobile applications. It’s also much more cost effective than developing a native application by hand for each platform. However, it’s only suitable for client-server applications where most of the business logic is at the server. The native client is mainly UI and can’t perform complex stand-alone processing.