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There are millions of applications available for the mobile phone owner to download to their phone covering every conceivable field of interest. The mobile market is dominated by 2 competing technologies; the iPhone form Apple and the Android operating system from Google. Not surprisingly an app written for one device will not run on the other. Thus a developer must invest in two separate applications when developing their paricular application.

iPhone applications are written in C, Objective C or more recently Swift. An Apple framework is used to get a consistent application suitable for the iPhone. Apple also controls what is placed on an iPhone by vetting the apps on iTunes. Developers must register and pay for the priveledge of developing for the iPhone. It can be argued that the control Apple keeps on the apps makes for a safer device than the Android solution.

Android development uses java with a Google framework. Google has released the framework for free and developers are free to do as they wish. Moreover an app can be loaded onto an Android phone from an web page on the Internet, although the user must accept the risks.

To develop an app for the vast majority of mobiles a developer needs to have two different demanding skill sets. Apart from games and some similar applications many apps for a mobile can easily be written as web apps - apps that can be delivered via the web. So for example a holiday booking app, a fitness app, a sales site can all be delivered as web apps using HTML5 / Javascript. there is significant extra cost rewriting these as Android and iPhone apps. there are systems such as PhoneGap that can take the web development code and convert this into a native iPhone and / or Andorid app at the press of a (few) buttons. So if an application can be written using web development technology, this automation of developing a native app is very cost effective. Apps without a real-time element are great to develop via web technologies and PhoneGap.