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I am developing an application which is kind of similar to Skype with some more features. I am amused and surprised by Skype's response to various mobile platforms i.e. iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, Bada OS etc.

I want to know how Skype is able to so rapidly release versions for iPhone, Android and Blackberry?

Do they write code targeting every platform separately or do they write code once and then use some utility to make it available across all platforms?

As a developer I am kind of curious to know the real technique which can be the reason of behind the scene magic. Any clues?

Answers with valid sources and references are more appreciated.

Bart
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Amit
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    This is in correlation how Android support so many manufacturers – ingsaurabh Dec 16 '11 at 11:40
  • No It is not. Diff manufacture do there own changes to make it work the way they want. Now this is an old question I ultimately used native language for Android and iPhone for this development. – Amit Oct 22 '19 at 10:58

2 Answers2

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They are an $800 million/year revenue company, its probably not a huge deal to support many platforms.

From Quora : http://www.quora.com/Skype/What-programming-language-was-Skype-originally-written-in

The original internal alpha version of UI was built in QT and we hoped to do few platforms at same take. However the result looked like crap, our progress seemed slow and we ditched the QT about 2 months before public beta release.

Delphi was chosen because our first senior UI developer was very skilled at Delphi (besides dozen other languages-environments) and we saw D as most productive, fastest, efficient way to build our app given our team/lead developer skills and also getting very good UX on MSWin platform.

For linux the QT remained and on OSX it has been Cocoa from the start. The functional core components which did the heavy lifting under the UI have always been the same C/C++ as Ahti pointed out.

mbwasi
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They developed different versions for every platform. There is no single language that supports all platforms, unfortunately. If there was, it'd still be a hassle because every platform his it's own platform API.

Tim S.
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  • Flex 4.5.1 supports all the three Biggies i.e. iPhone, android and BlackBerry Tablet OS.... But since it is released recently I am sure Skype has not used it... – Amit Dec 16 '11 at 11:48
  • Nothing works perfect on all platforms except native (which as an Android developer I can state doesn't always work perfect either :) ) – Warpzit Dec 16 '11 at 13:11