Mobile Moodle apps and themes have been a major facet of the Moodlenews coverage over the past 2 years. Despite the change in course for mobile Moodle applications at the official HQ level I think the road forward will constitute some great contributions to Moodle’s flexibility and usability for users world-wide.
The recent announcement by Martin Dougiamas, in short is that the native apps for both iOS and Android have been discontinued and cancelled (respectively); the iOS app lives on as GPL code ready for customizing.
In lieu of the native apps Moodle HQ is embracing a webservices based app formerly known as the “Unofficial Moodle Mobile” app which will take Moodle Mobile for all devices by the end of the year (possibly coinciding with Moodle’s December 2012 2.4 release).
Read the full announcement here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=206758
A. Ending development of the “My Moodle” native apps
We will no longer be developing the current iOS app “My Moodle” (or the unfinished Android clone of it). The iOS app will continue to be available in the Apple Store and should continue working for a long time yet.
The Objective-C code for the iOS app has been released under the GPL: https://github.com/moodlehq/mymoodle
You are free to use it to build your own apps (just be careful with the Moodle trademark).
B. Developing “Moodle Mobile” on HTML5 and Phonegap
We have contracted Juan Leyva from Moodle Partner CV&A Consulting to continue to lead development of his HTML5+Phonegap app (currently called Unofficial Moodle Mobile). The new app will be called ‘Moodle Mobile‘. Juan will be supported by Jerome Mouneyrac from Moodle HQ and others.
The new approach means every release can be compiled for all mobile platforms simultaneously. The trade-off is that the new app will be a little slower than a native app can be.
The new app uses Moodle’s built-in web services so it will have exactly the same out-of-the-box secure features that the current app has. One difference is that it will use the REST protocol so it gains some speed over the old app which used XML-RPC.
The app will be highly modular, and allow the community to contribute to development just like Moodle itself. See the current roadmap here: MOBILE-153.
The app will be licensed under the GPL. You are allowed to fork it and build your own custom apps if you wish. (Institutions may want to rebrand it and modify it for their own purposes).
Our target is to release first official versions of this new app around the time of Moodle 2.4 at the end of this year.