Google’s new Gears grind away at mobile app development

Google Inc. is hoping to help answer the question: WAP or app?
The Internet behemoth this week brought its Google Gears to mobile, making the application programming interface (API) available for Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 5 and 6. The idea is to help developers build Web-based applications — allowing them to create a single product instead of several different versions of the same offering — that mobile consumers can use both online and offline.
“Consider the sad state of mobile app development today: You often need to write native code, and build against four different SDKs, using five different compilers,” Google Software Engineer Chris Prince noted on the company’s blog. “It’s a daunting task, which explains why so few people write mobile applications.”
But mobile browsers have limited capabilities, Prince continued, rendering many Web-based applications unusable on a phone and forcing developers to build downloadable applications for more immersive experiences. Google Gears is designed to extend the capabilities of browsers, adding features that can support “an increasing number of mobile applications as Web apps.”