Porting is the adaptation of a piece of software so that it will function in a different computing environment to that for which it was originally written. It is the process where an Application migration involves moving an application built for one mobile platform to another.
Porting is making changes to software to make it run on different environment. Porting with respect to ‘wireless’ basically means to try and ‘fit’ one application into a variety of mobile devices from a variety of manufacturers and platforms. The ‘fitting’ includes two activities related to, but distinct, from porting called emulating and cross-compiling.
Porting is usually required because of differences in the central processing unit, operating system interfaces, different hardware, or because of subtle incompatibilities in or even complete absence of the programming language used on the target environment. It is far more cost effective to outsource the testing and porting of your mobile games & application to a third party.
In mobile game development, porting is the most important phase where the game has to run on a large number of models and has to cover most new models to get through the market.
Demand for mobile applications continues to increase day by day. This presents a huge opportunity as well as challenges for both small and large mobile development companies. One of biggest challenges facing the mobile application development companies is the sheer number of different operating systems, devices, device features, screen sizes and market requirements. Porting applications (iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm etc.) from one mobile device to another mobile device has become a critical challenge for every mobile development company.
In the past many mobile application development companies have considered applications porting in-house. However, just collecting the information and guidelines on this large number of mobile platforms and devices it-self could prove to be overwhelming and expensive. It is important to have a well-defined porting strategy in place to ensure smooth porting. Porting strategy addresses various mobile application-porting pitfalls that might arise.
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