TechCrunch has revealed that Facebook is carrying out a hidden project named Project Spartan, an HTML5 browser-based cloud platform to target millions of mobile users. To be more specific, initially for iPhone running HTML5 enabled Safari, and later for android. The platform obviously will have many powerful apps.
The motivation behind this for Facebook is to get control of their apps running on iPhone by directly challenging Apple’s App Store and sidestepping their mobile app distribution mechanism.
Currently, If you want to deploy a game or an App for iPhone; you need to develop it in Xcode using C, C++ or Objective-C and push it to Apple Store. Apple provides APIs for developers. You have to purchase a developer account costing $99 per year and your app/game is required to be in compliance with Apple's guidelines. It also involves a long approval process in case of updates/fixes to existing Apps/games further requiring the end users to download that update.
Instead of this process, an alternate is to build the app/game using HTML5. Although you may have limited functionality and features of the target device in comparison to the former process, however this gives great power and control to the developer without depending on Apple and avoiding the cost involved for apple store account.
It’s said to be a team of 80 developers according to TechCrunch, working with Facebook in collaboration of Zynga and Huffington Post on this platform which is expected to launch in next few weeks.(Unsurprisingly, Facebook haven’t commented on this stuff).
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