It’s been slightly more than a month and a half since I ventured into mobile application development and I’m quickly realising it’s a very different ballgame from normal web based application development.

The biggest difference is the amount of time it sucks doing testing. Having been doing the PHP/MySQL combination for the past couple of years, it was a simple “write code”, “save”, “refresh screen”. But development on the BlackBerry has been tedious because testing is done both on the simulator as well as on the physical phone. In both cases, loading up the simulator or re-starting the phone takes up a couple of minutes(roughly 2mins for the sim and about 5mins for the phone). This “pain of the waiting time” and “the lack of sleep” share an inversely proportional relationship.

And then there’s the pain of making sure it supports the various devices and different versions of the OS. This is where a good team does wonders. I’m glad i’m working with someone who’s been quite persevering through the first couple of projects that we took up. And i’m glad i’ve been given projects that have given us incremental exposure to the various aspects of BlackBerry development.

Soon, we’ll be able to take it up a notch.

And just out of curiosity, are you a BlackBerry developer? I can’t seem to find many of em around…