Discussion on:

Pros and cons of cross-platform mobile app development tools

I am exploring the Marmalade SDK that allows me to write cross-platform apps for Android, iOS, Windows, Blackberry, etc. using C/C++. Marmalade supplies a binary component for each platform that translates their C/C++ API into native calls to the platform API, and contains many optimizations for performance that scripting (HTML, CSS, JS) can't touch. Marmalade isn't cheap, but the cost of recoding an app in Jave and Objective-C is a lot more expensive.

Marmalade has had major use by game developers, and I'm still looking for show-stopper feature issues, but so far, this approach looks very good if you need better performance than the web-scripting APIs provide.

Marmalade seems to be improving all the time, with add-ins for interoperable features like in-app purchase, cloud services, etc.

I would be interested in comments by others who are working with similar cross-platform tools.

Every new thing has its pros and cons. But we should not stop exploring new things. I think you are absolutely correct in explaining both pros and cons of cross-platform mobile app development. But at the same time you should always think in a positive note. Let us continue with our experiment and make every impossible things possible.

When talking Cross platform, you cant narrow it down to PHone Gap and Titanium, these are only for HTML5 applications, and after release a couple of my own apps through this method, its not good enough, and the performance is terrible, especially when a developer needs the apps to run on some of the slightly older devices, where as Phone gap and Titanium use the Web View method, the old Android Devices just wont work. You should also cover platforms like Gideros and Corona, which can maintain 95% of the performance, and easy for Developers to pick up and deploy, and obtain the benefits mentioned above.
plus some the the negatives dont exist.