Choosing a mobile framework: Choose the platforms you need to target

This is a follow-up for Choosing mobile dev platform/framework and looks closer at the fifth step - Choose the platforms you need to target


This should be fairly simple, as you just have to list up the platforms you want to support. However, it is a good idea to also consider if the application should be for smartphones, tablets and/or desktops.

Here's a few examples:

1. You are going to make a game for tablets, but the game would be just as good on a desktop. You should consider if you need to develop the same twice (1 for desktop and 1 for tablet) or if you should have 1 codebase for both.
2. You are making an app for smartphones, but hope it can be reused on tablets. Should you go all the way to desktop as well, or stick with smartphones only, and perhaps make a minor tweaked version for tablets?
3. You are going to develop a desktop-only application. My question today would be: why? Wouldn't it be better to do a desktop + tablet or web version?

Basically you end up looking at both platforms and technology, when choosing which platforms to support. I do however recommend just choosing platform and form factors in this step and if needed change when looking at frameworks.

For my project I'm only targeting smartphones and tablets, however I do see that the application can work for desktop as well. So I will try to write reusable code. Reusable code is usually either very low level code or very high level code, while languages that are wrapper for low level quite often end up being quite platform specific.

For instance, VB and C# libraries isn't reusable across platforms, but C and JavaScript libraries is most likely reusable. (JavaScript is depending on the platforms web browser capabilities). There are more factors than only the language, but I've more or less always been able to adopt/port a C library to any given platform.

My conclusion for my current project will be to support in the following order:

1. Android and iOS
2. Windows Phone
3. (Windows 8 Tablets, if released...)
4. Desktop

For form factors this is my priority:

1. Tablets (7 inch and up)
2. Smartphones
3. Desktop (15 inch and up)

In a matrix to summarize:

	Tablet	Smartphone	Desktop
Android	1	2	-
iOS	1	2	-
Windows (7 and newer)	4	-	3
OS X (Lion+)	-	-	3
Windows (XP/Vista)	-	-	5
Matrix for preferred platforms and form factors

Since MS is very likely to release Windows 8 with tablet support, I need to consider that already now, as that might end up being the third major tablet-market player. Why didn't I include Googles chromebook? Currently I have 0 demand for chromebook versions, and that isn't likely to change within the next 12-18 months.

So focus is iOS and Android tablets first, smartphone second, then perhaps desktops (Win 7 + OS X).