Ask HN: What's the future of mobile app dev machines? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the future of mobile app dev machines?

1 pointrevorad13 comments

Do you see yourselves developing mobile apps on laptops and desktops for a long time?

Or do you reckon that sooner than later, you will be able to develop these apps on the same machines that they run on (smartphones and tablets)?

How soon do you think that might happen? What are the biggest hurdles?

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I think people are already innovating in this area! A local South Florida startup called Rheti is one in particular you should check out. Here's a presentation by the founder at 2011 O'Reilly Conference where he talks about your questions (what are the problems, how will it look, etc): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vySFqdlg0g

Thanks Mike. I'll check out the video. I'm curious to know what your own thoughts are on this.

Ah, alright. Well I a big challenge will be your interface since that's the primary change between desktop/mobile development. And most people seem to be innovating on that. I did see a few interesting demos that focused on new UI paradigms. LightTable was particularly interesting. Even though it was never demoed on a mobile device, I don't think it's hard to imagine how LightTable might work on an iPad.

The hardest problem, I think, is the environment. The UI stuff (like getting the same density of information around and under your hands while you're working on a piece of code) will get solved pretty easily. I'm more concerned that closed systems (like Apple's) will be threatening to any type of local development environment. Even basic web development, I'd expect to get full access to the developer tools within mobile Safari if I wanted.

Remote development (via ssh, perhaps) is a compromising solution here, but I'd really like to do my development offline if I need to. Being tether to an internet connection can be distracting and something you want the option of especially if you're mobile.

I have seen some interesting attempts to create an all-in-one solution within Android (and can't find the project right now) that has shell access with vi and ruby/python/scala interpreters/compilers built in.

I think progress in this area is happening much quicker than you think.

To some extent I feel the opposite is true - local dev might get solved more easily than a good mobile UI.

Because of the relatively open nature of Android, we're already seeing things like Android AIDE (as aniruddh mentioned in another comment here). With increasing power in mobile devices, we can definitely expect more powerful tools for on-device offline development.

But a good UI won't just come out of increasing processing power. It will take more deliberate effort.

Local dev has a great opportunity on Android, but Android tablets are still the minority. (I own one myself, but know only a handful of other people who do, too.) I think iPad has to be considered a target if mobile programming will ever become mainstream. Until Apple and developers can make nice and find a nice tradeoff between control-of-the-experience and hacker-friendliness, I think this will be a long face-off.

I will be surprised if Apple does not eventually allow programmers to program directly on iOS. I think they restrict it for now because of the limitations of the device.

If they don't go that way, then I'm willing to bet on Android or any other more hacker-friendly platform to give them a run for their money.

Ok I skimmed through the demo bits. They seem to be building a platform to let non-programmers build apps using simple building blocks. That's interesting but I'm mostly interested in proper coding on mobile devices.

I think one would have to think about what a desktop means. Is connecting your tablet to a 24inch monitor and a keyboard considered to be a desktop arrangement? Although the tablet is capable of developing apps, one might not be developing while walking or riding a bus. However, when docked it could be a dev device. Look at Android AIDE. It lets you build apps on an Ice Cream Sandwich device.

Connecting phones and tablets to bigger displays is definitely going to become common. But I'm more interested in developing on the go.

Thanks for pointing to Android AIDE. It looks great. Do you know of any good apps built on it?

Is there any equivalent app for iOS? I know about Codea, but that doesn't let you compile on the device.

The biggest hurdles are probably screen size & lack of symbols on the default keyboard layout.

I think they can be solved with a little design, creativity, and focus on common use cases before generality.

That's on the input side, but what about the output? You can't compile and run an app on your mobile phone yet.

Does the application have to be a fully-native one? I think an interpreted app would be possible, but distributing it would need distribution of a runtime.

Perhaps if the idea of developing apps on the device turns out to be of strategic importance for the platform, the main mobile OS makers would add some sort of compilation service to the OS. If this is true it would still need a killer-app to prove it.

Yeah I'm talking about fully native apps.

Imagine if you could only write apps for your laptop on a mainframe. That's how writing mobile apps on laptops feels like to me.

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