Israel’s Gingee joins the cross-platform app-development-tool fray

Israeli startup Gingee is launching its cross-platform app development tools today so mobile developers don’t have to go crazy developing for thousands of different devices.

Gingee points out there are 11,000 different Android devices running eight distinct versions of Android — along with smartphones and tablets working off iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and other platforms. And while app makers now use a cross-platform development solution for only 5 percent of the apps that they create, 68 percent of them expect to be able to do so by 2015, according to data from mobile market researcher Research2Guidance.

But development complexity is preventing developers from realizing those hopes. That has led to longer development cycles and more costs.

Gingee says its development solution will be truly cross-platform. It is available as a free download. The company made the platform to smooth out the complexity by providing an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface, which enables developers to create apps in an intuitive way, without coding, for iOS, all Android versions, the mobile web, and BlackBerry.

“We founded Gingee as application developers challenged by the fragmentation of devices, versions, and operating systems, looking for a solution for our specific mobile application development pains,” said Gingee chief executive and cofounder Roei Livneh.

“Today, we’re excited to help mobile application developers by launching the Gingee cross-platform application development solution free [of charge].”

Gingee claims its integrated development environment (IDE) automatically generates high-end code. That, in turn, can reduce the application development time by 57 percent per operating system, the company says. It creates one code in one pipeline and distributes it across all platforms.

The company showed off the tech at a recent hackathon, which advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) and Coca-Cola sponsored, where most of the participants had never written a line of code. At the end of the event, 11 working applications were written using Gingee’s technology.

“If someone who has never written a line of code can come in and develop an application from scratch in the course of a weekend, you know the application-development technology is incredibly user-friendly,” said Miguel Andres-Clavera, the creative technology and innovation director at BBH.

Gingee says its cross-platform application development technology is based on a proprietary algorithm which analyzes relations between objects and maps them uniformly to all operating systems and devices, ensuring a consistent interface and user experience across all devices and operating systems.

The company claims that it gets near-native performance (about 96 percent of native) because it communicates directly with an operating system. An app could have hundreds of moving objects on a screen without impacting performance. When an OS receives an update, developers have to reoptimize most apps. But Gingee says that isn’t necessary with its tech.

“We were able to launch Android and iOS versions of our application in significantly less time without needing any optimization for any operating system, and our testing and user responses show that the applications provide a native and user-friendly experience regardless of the device or operating system,” said Shay Ben Asulin, co-founder of Anyoption.

Livneh started Gingee in 2011 with $1.2 million in backing from angel investors. The company has 13 employees. It competes with rivals such as Unity Technologies, Corona, and Apportable.

The platforms features include an integrated physics engine, animation editor, asset manager, one-click social connection tools, and more than 40 highly optimized, preloaded components and widgets: dynamic texts, scrollers, buttons, and other assets.