Telerik Unveils Icenium – Cross-Platform App Development

Telerik, a major player in the software development industry, released information today regarding their latest deployment. Icenium, derived from the Integrated Cloud Environment (ICE) system, was announced through a press release on the company website, and promises it’s “reinventing cross-platform mobile development.” Many developers and users can attest to the frustrations of trying to create cross-platform software that functions appropriately on both the iOS and Android platforms. Will this product help alleviate some of the greatest challenges?

According to the press release:

As the number of platforms and mobile devices of varying shapes and sizes continue to grow exponentially, developers are saddled with having to manage multiple development environments. With Icenium, there is no need to download, configure and manage a myriad of SDKs, compilers, software packages and tools. By exposing SDKs through a cloud service, Icenium has decoupled the coding environment from the platform dependencies, enabling developers to focus on innovation, instead of managing cumbersome, platform-specific development environments.

Icenium Hopes to Bridge Development Gap

Using HTML5 and JavaScript developers are able to build native apps for iOS and Android devices without having to worry about SDK’s. According to the company website, knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript are all that are necessary to start developing cross-platform applications. By being cloud based developers will have new options in regard to when and where they work. The company claims their software can offer work-anywhere environments and real-time updates to multiple devices, doing away with the need to recompile.

The software is available to download immediately for free, through April of 2013, and the pricing terms begin at $16 per month with a 1 year contract. Developers can also choose a month-to-month program at $19 per month.

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The hope for many developers and users is that this might finally be the real answer to developing of applications for multiple environments in an effective and realistic manner. Users are the ones who truly lose when developers are not able to release similar builds of popular applications across iOS and Android platforms, so any news that hints that Icenium might be effective at alleviating that issue is received with high levels of anticipation.

Are you a developer? Do you have any plans to try the Icenium software? Let us know what you think!