Thoughts on Rhomobile

I've spent a wee bit of time getting my feet wet with Rhomobile these past few days, as I mentioned in the previous post. Specifically, I got an account at Rhohub, a "hosted development environment" for the Rhomobile platform.

Put simply, Rhomobile is an attempt to make it easy to develop for all the major smartphone platforms (iPhone, Android, Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile). You write it once, doing the design/layout in HTML/CSS and the logic in Ruby (all pretty accessible stuff), and then create natively installable packages that can use advanced hardware functionality (camera, accelerometer, etc.). The idea is that you get the ease of a "webapp" (e.g. a webpage tailored for mobile use) with the power (and maybe speed) of a native application.

The main catch? Every Rhomobile app needs to be packed in with requisite Ruby libraries, meaning that even a tiny program (a few kilobytes of code) will end up needing 2mb or more of phone space. Not a huge deal for iPhone and higher-end Nokia's, but definitely a significant limitation for the current T-Mobile G1 and many other smartphones that have limited space for applications.

But really that's not a horrible catch, and I think we can expect phone storage space to increase at a faster pace than Ruby library size (or at least I'd hope so). So, I'm quite enthusiastic about the possibilities of native cross-platform smartphone development, though as of now the documentation (particularly for Rhohub) is somewhat lacking and so I haven't actually done anything substantial. I may at least show a "Hello World" type app here later, so stay tuned and thanks for reading!

Addendum - Adam from Rhomobile let me know that the minimal app size is actually not as severe an issue as I thought: "Regarding app size, for what its worth, the most recent Rhodes-based AppStore apps that I've seen is On My Means which is 1.4MB. The "minimal size" is significantly smaller than 2MB. But I'm not sure if I've ever seen a Rhodes app larger than 4MB."