I've been doing Flex programmering lately, for mobile platforms.

Flex is a great framework, and the applications perform quite nicely. The cross-platform is pretty good as well; only platform-specific items like store integration and such need native extensions, and so far everything I've wanted to do (store, network info, file permissions for iOS [gah], and push notifications) has been covered.

That said, there are some definite differences.

iOS: easy easy easy. Make your application, test it on the built-in emulator, export the .ipa and load it via iTunes. The last bit involves a small manual step (drag and drop), but not a big deal. However, actually building the executable takes 15 minutes on my MacPro. Good thing there's a quick-build version (15 seconds), although it runs more slowly. The app looks exactly the same on the device as it does in the emulator. Scaling and such between the iPhone 4 and iPods is ridiculously easy. Not so much going to the iPad given its lower pixel density and higher resolution (different for the iPad 3, but I don't have one to test yet).

Releasing an iOS app is another matter. Build several certs, upload the file to the store, then wait for weeks to get it approved. Well, maybe not weeks, but we're up to 11 days now.

Android: For the Kindle Fire, kind of a pain in the ass. I had to build a Kindle emulator in the device manager, manually add the vendor IDs to Google's adb setup (Android Debug Bridge), and then figure out how to get the Kindle to connect to Flash Builder. I'm not done yet, so I'll let you know. In the meantime, I have to build the .apk file, manually copy it to the Kindle's flash memory, then use a file browser on the device to install the application. Once it's there, the font sizing is off by just enough to necessitate a few round trips to get everything looking nice. On the plus side, the full executable only takes a few minutes to build. On the negative side, this thing is about as slow as my iPod touch.

Getting the app to layout correctly on various Android devices was a complete pain in the ass too.

I haven't tried releasing an app into the Amazon store yet, but I've read a few horror stories that claim doing so takes longer than Apple's store. I hope not.