Is Marmalade SDK more relevant or commonly used for Game Development?

Question

I am absolutely new to Mobile App Development and was looking for an appropriate platform to start off with. I came across a project where people are looking to implement self-help advertising for a switch and home automation company into a mobile app. They want an iPhone App initially but also want to deploy on Android and other platforms subsequently. A similar app is this one.

After investing a fair amount of time in researching about various SDKs and Developer Programs, Marmalade caught my attention with it's multi-platform deployment feature. However after going through a few tutorials, of which I found these quite helpful, I observed that more often than not the tutorials concern Game Development. So, I was wondering if Marmalade is a more appropriate platform for Game Development and if I am looking to develop a general application I should perhaps consider a native SDK?

Bergmans

Answer 1

Marmalade is great for games: among the games that use Marmalade are Cut the Rope, Plants vs Zombies, Call of Duty: Black Ops, etc

But for general apps you should better use some other tool at least till their Marmalade 6.0. They have native UI support but it's still in development and you may miss some features.

Look at Titanium: http://www.appcelerator.com/showcase/applications-showcase/

Sprinkling

There was another reason for which I considered Marmalade. I don't have a Mac with me right now and I was looking for alternatives around that problem. Big advantage of Marmalade was that I could make it work on Windows. Titanium again would require Mac OS X machine and XCode already installed on it. I guess I need a Mac I want to create proper Native UI apps. – Bergmans

Yes, Marmalade needs Mac only for a few minutes to submit app to AppStore. All other including signing files can be done using PC. If you hate Macs you can consider installing MacOS on PC - hackintosh.com – Sprinkling

Thanks. I was thinking on similar lines. :) – Bergmans

Answer 2

I always prefer to use native language for the app development due to easily available help and tutorial for them. You can find lot's of help and tutorial, guidelines, books etc. for Android or Objective C development, but their are very few tutorials on Marmalade. Marmalade is a great engine for any game developer, but for a non-gaming app, I'd not recommend it, since you'll never need to use the extra features which are it's USP.

Vestal