Ideaworks Labs announces Airplay SDK now enables single-click deployment to all Android and iPhone devices

9 Oct 2009, London: Ideaworks Labs, creator of the cross-platform Airplay SDK for native mobile application development, announces that Airplay SDK now supports natively-compiled Android applications for all Android devices currently in the market.

Airplay SDK uniquely allows developers to deploy rich connected applications across hundreds of devices by compiling their application once to native CPU instructions, then deploying with a single click to iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BREW and other platforms.

Developers write a single codebase using standard C++, POSIX and OpenGL ES APIs, irrespective of the underlying operating system or hardware. The Airplay APIs and resource framework make it simple to accommodate varying device form factors such as screen size, touchscreen, keypad and accelerometer. Furthermore, all device-specific firmware issues and idiosyncrasies are handled within the Airplay runtime. Developers can save up to 40% of their initial development cost, and up to 90% of their device porting and testing costs, as well as opening up target devices that were previously considered too cumbersome or expensive to target.

“We welcomed Google’s decision to introduce support for native code sections within Android SDK 1.5”, says Tim Closs, CTO Ideaworks Labs. “Airplay SDK effectively builds your entire Android application as a native code section. As well as offering improved user experiences through huge performance increases, this approach allows Android to be added as a truly supported Airplay platform; developers can compile their application once to native CPU instructions, then deploy with a single click to Android, iPhone, and all other open smartphone platforms. Of course, Airplay also handles all the differences between Android devices, effectively presenting Android devices as a single platform for developers.”

José Carlos López, Technical Director at Virtway Software, said: “Several months ago we made the decision to adopt Airplay SDK for the development of a next-generation social networking application for ICYOU, initially targeted at iPhone. We were amazed to see that, with a single click and without even recompiling the application, we were able to generate an Android build that runs beautifully on multiple devices. For zero additional cost, we can now target all Android devices, and that will certainly open up a huge additional market for our application.”