With our existing open source iOS and Android apps, you can see how we built Tinker and base your own apps off our work. However, we recognize that it takes significant work to strip out the existing colors, images, and main Tinker view and add in your own screens and functionality.
That’s why, as part of our roadmap for releasing the Photon in March 2015, we’re building mobile SDKs for iOS, Android, and PhoneGap. Our mobile team is already hard at work on them.
Every mobile app built on Spark OS and the Photon will require the Soft AP setup process, so we’re working out all the details, all the edge cases, and bundling that into our SDKs. When you build apps with the Spark mobile SDKs, you’ll get Soft AP for free.
Same goes for account creation and OAuth integration. Everyone needs it, so no one should have to build it. We’ve got you covered.
Additionally as you create your own screens and need to call your Spark.variables and Spark.functions on user input you’ll need a simple, idiomatic API in Objective-C, Java, and/or JavaScript. Again, if everybody needs it, then we want to take care of it for you.
The JavaScript interface is already available in sparkjs—that’s how you’ll access the Spark OS REST API from PhoneGap. Similar iOS and Android libraries are in progress.
We also are working on the easiest “getting started” process you can imagine. Specify your brand colors, some images, your terms of service and privacy policy in a simple file, run one command in your terminal, and boom—working iOS and Android apps that you can load on your phone, with Soft AP, account creation and login all baked in.
You can expect that these SDKs will be released when we start shipping Photons in March.