Android vs Windows Mobile vs Java ME: a comparative study of mobile development environments

In this paper we look at three mobile development environments: Windows Mobile, Java ME and Android. Through platform comparison, the different environments are examined closely and strengths and weaknesses are brought to life. In all three environments example applications are written to compare the environments in action on respective devices. Environment specific deployment files are created to illustrate amount of boilerplate code and overhead during deployment. Different key areas such as implementation aspects, performance aspects and quality assurance are compared to give an in depth overview of the status of the different platforms. Our results show that although the three environments are similar in some aspects they still represent three distinctive fields each with their respective characteristics. Through our code examples and platform comparison we come to the conclusion that the Windows Mobile and Android platform provides a better development environment, whereas Java ME still struggles with poor emulator support and incompatible implementations. The main features they have in common are also seen in trends directly visible in the programming languages such as unit testing, language features and end user distribution strategies. Big differences are highlighted when inspecting community environments, hardware abilities and platform maturity. This will have large influence on the choice of development platform for creating novel assistive environment applications.