Cost of developing mobile apps
October 10, 2011 10:54 AM   Subscribe

What do I need to develop mobile apps?

My job asked me to look into developing mobile apps for iOS, Android and possibly Blackberry (all of the apps will be free)

Here is what I discovered so far, please tell me if I'm missing anything:

iOS:
- need a Mac to create the app
- Apple Developer Program (99$)
- XCode 4 and iOS SDK 4 (free with Developer program)
- iPhone/iPod Touch, obviously

Android:
- 25$ fee for putting app on market
- Java SDK, Android SDK all free

Blackberry:
- Java and Blackberry SDK (free?)
- Developer Zone


Does anyone know if I need to pay to join some kind of Blackberry developer program or to release the app? I googled around and found posts from a year or two ago taking about spending 200$ to buy tokens that I could use to release/update apps, but I can't find any more info on the Blackberry Developer Zone website
posted by Cloud King to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
You are going to want a large variety of phones by various manufacturers for testing. Emulators are not enough to guarantee your app works how you want it across many devices.
posted by shownomercy at 11:30 AM on October 10, 2011


You will need a Blackberry developer account but AFAIK, you don't need to spend any money to get your apps on the market. At least I didn't for the Playbook.
posted by wongcorgi at 11:36 AM on October 10, 2011


Don't forget Windows Phone 7:
SDK (Gizmodo link)

Or alternately the SDK for Phone 7 plus Cloud services: Windows Phone 7 + Cloud Services SDK (preview)

Unsurprisingly, both SDKs run on Windows, and the JAVA SDK will probably be handy as well.

I recommend exploring the fora at xdadevelopers.com; it's a haven of HTC fans, and there's a lot of Android ROM development going on there, and I presume there's also app development as well.
posted by Sunburnt at 3:15 PM on October 10, 2011


Another cost: developer(s) well-versed in Java, Objective-C, and the relevant APIs.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 8:42 PM on October 10, 2011


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