Mobile Devs you can now have a single backend for your Android and iOS apps | Hacker News Reader

Mobile Devs you can now have a single backend for your Android and iOS apps

techcrunch.com

18 pointsjanaboruta6 comments

Kind of strange title, to me. I don't know why anyone would ever create separate server-side backends for different mobile platforms. I guess this just means that this company is providing libraries for both Android and iOS? Are the other "easy mobile app backend" services focused strictly on one platform or the other?

Hey, sorry if the title confused you. What we've heard from many mobile developers is that they want their apps to be cross-platform so they can reach more users. We have spent over a year building a platform that allows people to build a backend to their mobile apps very easily. We first focused on iOS and now our platform supports Android as well.

What we mean by single backend is you can have one backend and you don't need to know whether you are on an Android or iOS platform. You get the same analytics. You get push sent by username without caring whether it's an Android or iOS. If you are curious to see how it all works read our latest blog post http://bit.ly/onEjgM

The title confused me as well. Can you revise it to something like the "Backend Service Provider StackMob Comes To Android" title which the linked article used?

I'm still confused. I'm neither an iOS nor and Android developer, so maybe this is not a confusing situation to them. But:

> What we mean by single backend is you can have one backend and you don't need to know whether you are on an Android or iOS platform. You get the same analytics.

I can't fathom why a backend service would ever not work this way.

Hype much? Why would an API ever be platform-specific?

EDIT: Has anybody ever actually used one of this cloud-hosted mobile backend services? Is it really any better than writing/hosting my own backend? Can it move beyond the trivial store-and-retrieve case?

Hey Mizza - I'm one of the engineers that worked on Android support. Until today, our entire push and device registration system was iOS specific. Today it becomes device agnostic. The blog post that janaboruta added goes into detail on what's changed.

To answer your other questions, I can only answer with my opinion. Obviously I've used some mobile backend platforms and I believe that they offer features beyond the trivial store and retrieval case. The obvious and biggest feature that comes to mind is supporting push notifications out of the box.

But there are a few more that at least StackMob provides, such as the ability to version your API out of the box, run multiple versions concurrently, have a sandbox environment in which to develop, have the option to extend the platform with your own code, and have good analytics for your app. We're always adding new features too.

As an Android & iOS developer before I worked at StackMob, I generally had to do some work to implement all of those things. We're aiming to build these things well so that any mobile engineer can use them and focus on building a great app instead of a great backend.

Hope that helps.

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