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Building apps for multiple devices is now essential. Grapple is a full service solution – we'll design and build your apps with our expertise. We also take the hassle out of signing, testing and distribution by rapidly deploying your apps to all the leading app stores.
Grapple also make your apps future proof – by always keeping our handset database up to date.
Hear it all from Ed Lea, Grapple CTO (Europe's number #1 iPhone developer)
It's quick and easy to build and distribute mobile apps to multiple devices including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia and other Java enabled devices, whilst utilising all the native features of the individual handset.
Grapple has created a development environment for building native mobile phone applications with standard web technologies - HTML, CSS and Javascript.
With our unique technology we can design and build apps for you.
Engage and interact with all mobile phone users.
Building and distributing a mobile application for multiple devices has traditionally been difficult, time consuming and prohibitively expensive. With Grapple's powerful technology, mobile apps can be created for multiple devices & mobile devices enabling you to reach your entire audience easily.
Grapple works with over 500 devices - don't exclude anyone from being able to use your app.
Time to market is critical. With Grapple app development takes days for multiple devices rather than weeks. Grapple enables a quick build for all native interfaces and mobile operating systems.
We take the frustration and pain out of app development by providing you with a full service. Our ideas team, led by Ed Lea, Grapple CTO and Europe's #1 mobile app developer, will help at every stage.
At Grapple we pride ourselves on providing our friends with a world leading service. We understand your app development requirements and the pressures you're under to deliver quality apps quickly and on budget.
Any problems, simply call, email or even Skype us and we'll be there for you. That means coming round to your place if we need to. After all, what are friends for!
Regardless of how you engage with Grapple, we deliver a unique full service solution, that takes you from concept to download, enabling you to create an app that will help you hit your business objectives.
Our approach means a reduction in time and labour, cutting costs by up to 75%.
• Testing – Grapple's stringent testing facility ensures the highest quality in app production
• Approval and submission of your apps – making sure your app is accepted by handset manufacturers, operators and 3rd party app stores
• Hosting – the ability to distribute your app independent from app stores via our cloud hosted solution
• Analytics – we cover all app analytics from the number of downloads to the frequency of app usage
• Future proofing – we constantly update the devices we support to ensure your app is always available on all the latest releases, irrespective of when your app was created
Please click on a question below to learn more.
The Grapple technology is a development environment for building native mobile phone applications with standard web technologies - HTML, CSS and Javascript. Using a hybrid compiler and virtualisation technology, applications can be written once and run on multiple mobile platforms including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Symbian.
Grapple can be used to build native mobile apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian phones (including those from Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG) and any handset that can run J2ME binaries. These handset types account for over 95% of all mobile devices currently in use.
Because developers use HTML, CSS and Javascript to write apps on Grapple, the apps are only limited by the capabilities of these languages. As a rule of thumb, any functionality that you couldn't create with these languages on the web won't be possible with Grapple. So games, for example, where you might use Flash, are out of scope. Beyond that you are only limited by your creativity!
Any developer or our developers with experience building websites using HTML, CSS and Javascript can use Grapple to build native mobile applications. The vast number of front-end web developers already have all the skills they need to use Grapple. The traditional requirement for Objective-C developers for iPhone, Java for Android, C++ for Symbian, etc is replaced by a single skill-set for all platforms.
Grapple employs one of two approaches to build for many platforms from a single HTML, CSS and Javascript codebase. For traditional mobile operating systems, such as Symbian and those capable of running J2ME apps and midlets, a compiler technology is used. This removes the burden of parsing HTML and CSS on older devices and for a Javascript runtime. As well as providing performance gains, compiling HTML, CSS and Javascript into native Java code ensures consistent user-experience across devices and is not susceptible to differences between web browsers on different devices at runtime.
On more modern mobile operating systems, such as iPhone and Android, we virtualise the WebKit browser framework that ships with the device. Taking WebKit as a starting point, we extend the Javascript APIs available to consistently provide access to device specific components such as the camera and GPS.
Because your app is written with very high-level languages the development time is typically much quicker than using the languages and tools provided by vendor SDKs. This advantage is then compounded by creating one codebase and deploying it for all your targeted mobile platforms.
For example, a typical iPhone application can be created in half the time using Grapple instead of Apple's iPhone SDK. This means that not only is it twice as quick, but for no extra effort your application can also run on the other 450+ devices that Grapple supports.
As with any software development the end product will only be as good as the people and processes that create it. Grapple have a number of best practice guidelines around designing, planning, coding, testing and deploying apps that will help maximise the capabilities of your developers.
Using Grapple's user-interface libraries creates applications that use native look-and-feel UI components by default. This ensures that, without any specific knowledge of the targeted platforms, your user's application will have an iPhone experience on iPhone, Android experience on Android, BlackBerry experience on BlackBerry, etc.
As with any software project, testing mobile apps is an important part of the development process. While developing we strongly recommend that applications are tested both on the Grapple simulator and the simulators provided in vendor SDKs.
Once you are confident that your application functions in the simulators then you should publish to Grapple and test the binaries it produces on physical devices. As Grapple supports over 450 different devices at the time of writing, it's clearly not practical to test on every single device type that your app might be run on. Instead, the most important thing is that you build confidence in your app. By testing on a selection of devices that you are targeting, it is very easy to gain confidence. The compiled and virtualised nature of the binaries Grapple creates means that if an application runs on one platform is has an incredibly high likelihood to run the same on all devices.
As well as being a development technology, Grapple also provides an app hosting service. When you build an app with Grapple, all the binaries are stored on our servers. This is so that your users can download the app from a single, centralised location and a unique URL is generated from which all versions of the app can be downloaded.
Our phone detection database will make sure that a user will only be able to install binary for their phone. This database is constantly refreshed and enhanced to keep up to date with new devices.
Alternatively, apps can be distributed via vendor or third party app stores. Indeed, for iPhone this is currently the only way to distribute apps. Submission to app stores is something that the Grapple team has huge experience of and so are available to either provide guidance or do it on your behalf.
