Rhomobile promises: Build once, deploy to any smartphone

March 24, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

If you’re interested in developing a mobile application but find the range of phones out there to be overwhelming, a startup called Rhomobile wants to help. Not only does its Rhodes programing framework allow you to build mobile applications using HTML and Ruby (much easier than, say, using the Objective C normally required for the iPhone), but your application is then available for iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Android smartphones.

In other words, Rhomobile basically brings the “build once, deploy anywhere” goal of web and desktop application developers to the mobile world. Chief executive Adam Blum says the company was inspired in part by pain he was experiencing at his last job at mobile email company Good Technology, where he says more than 200 engineers struggled to put out applications for three smartphone operating systems. (Competitor Visto bought Good from Motorola earlier this year.)

“I can’t imagine doing that with five [operating systems],” Blum says.

Enter Rhomobile. Apps developed using the Cupertino, Calif.’s platform are deployed as native applications on all five systems, and have customized looks to match — for example, a list in an iPhone application will use the iPhone’s scroll wheel. And Rhomobile is officially taking Rhodes out of testing mode today.

Rhomobile doesn’t yet support features that are available on only some phones, such as the iPhone’s multi-touch capabilities. Blum says that’s one of the items on the company’s to-do list, plus developing compatibility with the upcoming Palm Pre.

Those limitations also speak to the kind of developer that probably won’t want to use Rhomobile, namely one who thinks that (say) iPhone or BlackBerry support is good enough. Even after the company adds support for multi-touch and other specialized features, I imagine it will be hard to make an app that both works across five or six platforms and takes advantage of the features of the iPhone or the BlackBerry or the Android in a compelling way.

As for competition, Blum says PhoneGap provides a similar service, but only works on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry, and requires development on JavaScript, rather than HTML and Ruby. And unlike PhoneGap, Rhomobile focuses (without being limited to) business applications — Blum says he suspects that his company’s customer base will eventually consist predominantly of large corporations building their own custom apps for in-house use.

Rhomobile has raised $1 million in funding from vSpring Capital.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • This would be a great help especially those who wants to develop their own mobile apps. Thanks for sharing.
  • I this is a great product it will save developers a lot of time and money.
  • Ryan
    This sounds very interesting, especially if they can address all the unique UI features that come with each phone (such as tab bars on the iphone).

    However, isn't a 5 second start-up time for an app built on Rhomobile a bit long?
  • forever4now
    The PhoneGap comment "only works on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry" is a bit misleading. There are plans for PhoneGap to support all major smartphone OSes. I suspect Palm's WebOS will be added in the near future, since WebOS also uses HTML & JavaScript to build applications (i.e. there should be a straight forward mapping between PhoneGap & WebOS).

    One thing I like about PhoneGap is that, if it is able to establish a standard set of JavaScript functions that map to all core smartphone services (geolocation, accelerometer, sound, ...), smartphone OS vendors could potentially provide a native implementation & eliminate the need for PhoneGap entirely.
  • Would love to see PhoneGap do all smartphones. I've referred customers to them when people would prefer to write in JavaScript versus HTML+Ruby as we enable, and don't ever need to do synchronized data.
  • Sync'd data is fully possible with PhoneGap and, yes, we have a plan for all smartphone operating systems and it is an explicit project goal for the project to cease to exist. We believe in enabling web technology with device capability. It really is only a matter of time.