Adobe has announced significant tooling advancements in app development as part of the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 release that will provide an iPhone developer for the first time a single app development platform for building high quality apps. These advancements consist of all latest tooling and framework support in Flash Builder™ 4.5 for developing, testing and deploying apps on iOS platforms. The released software also supports Android and BlackBerry platforms.

Adobe Flex 4.5 that provides support for building applications for iPhone developers is expected in June 2011. This new approach in app development enables an iPhone developer to take advantage of a single tool chain, programming language and code base to effortlessly develop high quality mobile apps. Flex 4.5 will significantly improve performance of an iPhone developer in addition to reducing development time and costs.

Flash Builder 4.5 will speed-up Flex and ActionScript project development including round-trip workflows with Adobe Flash Catalyst CS 5.5 software. It will also allow iPhone developers and designers to correspondingly work throughout app development. The software also includes new capabilities to facilitate faster and more productive coding.

Ed Rowe, vice president of development tooling, Adobe says “With these releases, developers for the first time have a single development platform for building highly expressive Web, mobile, and desktop applications, marking a leap forward for mobile app development”.

“With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, enterprises now need to ensure that their applications work seamlessly across many different types of devices. Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 will now allow companies to standardize on a common platform capable of delivering rich and consistent application experiences that perform great across Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS devices,” he added.

Adobe is planning to release updates to the Flex framework in June that will allow iPhone developers to reprocess most or all of their code across apps that target many platforms. Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 is planned to ship within 30 day. The software will be available through Adobe Authorized Resellers, Adobe Direct Sales and at www.adobe.com/store. The price is expected to be US$249 for Flash Builder 4.5 Standard, US$699 for Flash Builder 4.5 Premium, US$399 for Flash Catalyst and US$699 for Flash Professional.

Source- Adobe

A study by Appsfire, a leading mobile app discovery platform, has thrown some crucial insights for iOS app developers. Analysis of more than 1,000 iOS devices from its users reveal that native apps excel over web applications. The analysis shows that while web applications are gaining more ground everyday but still native applications seem to excel over it.

As per the study by Appsfire, iPhone and other Apple device users, on an average spend just 10% of their time in a mobile browser. The figure that includes the time spent on web applications is in direct contrast to 50% of time spent by an average user on native apps. Time spent on native apps doesn’t include default mail and other general applications.

The analysis also threw upon other interesting data for iPhone developers:

- An average iOS device owner actively installs 88 fresh apps in his device.

- Paid apps constitute around 23% of the total apps downloaded on a device.

- Gaming occupies 32% of time spent by a user on native apps.

The latest analysis has once again confirmed the growing popularity and usage of iPhone apps among smartphone users. It also shows that the market for paid applications is also on upsurge. And, lastly games have retained their dominated position in the app market with users spending most of their browsing time on playing games.

With sales of iOS devices on the rise and users showing more inclination towards various apps, iPhone application developers can be assured of higher downloads in the future.

The latest declaration of Facebook has clarified the total number of iOS Facbook app users; and this is not 100 millions but 44 millions.

The figure may be disappointing for Facebook, which has been successful to attract a magic figure of 500 million users world wide; but they are successful to attract almost 44% of the iOS device users including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users. It’s worth a mention that Apple has sold around 59 millions of iPhones by June, 2010.

In their statement, Facebook has said, “There are currently 44 million monthly active users of the Facebook for iPhone app. We recently changed the definition of mobile active users to exclude those who have only liked or commented on stream stories. Instead we are counting “active” users as people who have taken explicit actions within an application.”
This has put a full stop to all the speculations in the iPhone developers community about the actual number of the users. Although the magic figure of 100 million is a myth as of now, it still indicates that the iPhone Facebook app is hugely popular in the App Store. The pace of growth of Facebook in last couple of years, and the popularity of the app in App Store clearly suggests that the iPhone app developers and other service providers can use it successfully for a more effective branding purpose.