

Mobile Devs you can now have a single backend for your Android and iOS apps - janaboruta
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/12/backend-service-provider-stackmob-comes-to-android/

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mccutchen
Kind of strange title, to me. I don't know why anyone would ever create
separate server-side backends for different mobile platforms. I guess this
just means that this company is providing libraries for both Android and iOS?
Are the other "easy mobile app backend" services focused strictly on one
platform or the other?

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janaboruta
Hey, sorry if the title confused you. What we've heard from many mobile
developers is that they want their apps to be cross-platform so they can reach
more users. We have spent over a year building a platform that allows people
to build a backend to their mobile apps very easily. We first focused on iOS
and now our platform supports Android as well.

What we mean by single backend is you can have one backend and you don't need
to know whether you are on an Android or iOS platform. You get the same
analytics. You get push sent by username without caring whether it's an
Android or iOS. If you are curious to see how it all works read our latest
blog post <http://bit.ly/onEjgM>

~~~
mccutchen
I'm still confused. I'm neither an iOS nor and Android developer, so maybe
this is not a confusing situation to them. But:

> _What we mean by single backend is you can have one backend and you don't
> need to know whether you are on an Android or iOS platform. You get the same
> analytics._

I can't fathom why a backend service would ever _not_ work this way.

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Mizza
Hype much? Why would an API ever be platform-specific?

EDIT: Has anybody ever actually used one of this cloud-hosted mobile backend
services? Is it really any better than writing/hosting my own backend? Can it
move beyond the trivial store-and-retrieve case?

~~~
jay_aras
Hey Mizza - I'm one of the engineers that worked on Android support. Until
today, our entire push and device registration system was iOS specific. Today
it becomes device agnostic. The blog post that janaboruta added goes into
detail on what's changed.

To answer your other questions, I can only answer with my opinion. Obviously
I've used some mobile backend platforms and I believe that they offer features
beyond the trivial store and retrieval case. The obvious and biggest feature
that comes to mind is supporting push notifications out of the box.

But there are a few more that at least StackMob provides, such as the ability
to version your API out of the box, run multiple versions concurrently, have a
sandbox environment in which to develop, have the option to extend the
platform with your own code, and have good analytics for your app. We're
always adding new features too.

As an Android & iOS developer before I worked at StackMob, I generally had to
do some work to implement all of those things. We're aiming to build these
things well so that any mobile engineer can use them and focus on building a
great app instead of a great backend.

Hope that helps.

