Here's the claim from PhoneGap (http://www.phonegap.com/):
"Developing with PhoneGap gives you the freedom to create mobile applications for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Palm WebOS, Bada and Symbian using the web code you know and love: HTML, CSS and Javascript."
So lets try. We can take our cross-browser web app and convert it into a device specific or native app - hmmm, which one? Ideally i´d like to publish to the following: AppStore (iPhone/iPad), AppHub (Windows Phone 7), AppWorld (Blackberry) and GooglePlay (Android), but there's a developer fee to pay: AppStore (100$), AppHub (100$), AppWorld (200$), GooglePlay (25$). On closer inspection it looked as though I could register for AppWorld for free given that the iLearnPad app is free, but then I discovered that I couldn´t logon - my account had been disabled. So in the end I chose to register with one app market, GooglePlay:
http://developer.android.com/index.html | Links | Google Play Developer Console
I followed the instructions from PhoneGap for setting up an Android Project:
http://www.phonegap.com/ | Getting Started Guides | Getting Started with Android
and found that having enabled the web app to make use of HTML5 mp3 audio it didn´t work from the Android Emulator:
http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
Instead of the HTML5 Audio element or object we are able to make use of the PhoneGap API Media object, which works in a simlar fashion - just pass it the audio file to play. So instead of:
we have:
From the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) we can build the iLeapPad project and see it run as a native app from within the Android emulator:
OK so we have our native app or .apk, a compressed file containing for example
a) our assets - sound, images, css and js files,
b) our resources - application icons and
c) our signing information contained in .SF and .RSA files - each app must be signed with a password protected private key createable from within Eclipse using the application export function.
Now we need to upload it to GooglePlay.With every new upload we need to provide marketing information such as:
- App screenshots (x2)
- App logos or icons (x3 with differing dimensions)
- App title
- App description
- Latest "features of"/"bugs fixed in" app description
- Advertising description that helps draw people to your app
- App classification - a bit like a cinema film classification - all, low/middle/high level
- App category e.g. photography, learning,
- Price
- Availability in terms of countries and
- Developer contact details e.g. website, email address.
and here´s where the app in Google Play lives:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=KGRSystems.iLearnPad.ryanki1
The source code for the project can be found at:
https://github.com/ryanki1/iLearnPad
*** You have reached the end of the blog "iLearnPad - Taking a Web App to the Marketplace" - let me know if you found it helpful or if you have questions :-) ***
