Marmalade Mobile App Development - Is Marmalade a Good Choice? [closed]

Question

I’ve got some apps on the cards, my target platform of choice is Android, however I’m aware that there are some SDK’s around advertising the ability to write once and deploy to multiple mobile Operating Systems. One such seems to be Marmalade.

This product in particular claims compilation to native code per device to achieve compatibility. What I’d like to know, before i commit to the price tag, or even developing outside the manufacturers intended frameworks – is peoples thoughts on the matter.

Compilation to native code would assumedly have high performance, however I am guessing there’s a tradeoff where you lose easy access to all of the API’s provided by google/apple, etc.

Looking for any other pros/cons and whether or not people who went with something like marmalade hit road blocks, wished they had not made the move.

My apps will not require a 3d engine, which seem to make up the bulk of the sample apps on the marmalade showcase. My apps will however generally want to store quite a lot of relational data & hit web services, so convenient access to sql compact would be nifty.

Lagrange

Answer 1

I work at Marmalade caveat.

The solution that we provide offers high performance because it does not rely on a virtual machine like other cross platform solutions do. Additionally you can use native APIs directly using our EDK (Extension Developer Kit) that allows you to package up calls to native calls on iOS and Android. So you need not miss out on these.

Take a look at this blog by one of our developers who has taken his game across a whole bunch of platforms with little effort using Marmalade http://www.drmop.com/

For the last comment, we do provide sqlite support through our open source modules.

Marcellusmarcelo

Thanks, i'll check out that blog. I've viewed most of the demo material on the marmalade site and noticed the native call support -thats good. I guess from here the big question is when is marmalade NOT a good choice? The apps i have on the cards are 2d games & normal text oriented apps. Some of the apps wont be saleable quality so will rely on PPC Advertising - will there be any roadblocks there? One of the clients has requested his app be able to be interactive on device home screens (like weather apps, or the youtube app) - is this EDK territory? – Lagrange

#20184557 Hi. Wondering if you could provide me any hints on this one. – Ranique

Answer 2

Look at Cut the Rope or Plants vs Zombies. I doubt that you need more than they need - and they use Marmalade to port games to non-iOS devices.

Regarding sql - you can use sqlite: https://github.com/marmalade/sqlite

The only trade-off is development speed. It's several times faster to write scripts in Unity and use their visual tools but you are also forced to use Unity tools and if you have more than 40K vertices visible per frame game will be slow at iPhone 3GS (10K for 3G and older).

With Marmalade in theory you should know Visual C++ but when you need some things specific to iOS or Android and no one still made library for that you have to take their EDK, native SDK and write libraries by yourself. It's not that hard and you can outsource that if you don't have time to learn new SDK.

Adviser