Drund Gives Devs & Users All-in-One Tool for Connected Devices

Dev shop Azork launched Monday Drund, a broad, agnostic development and management platform for apps across all connected devices and browsers.

The platform also has an aspect for users, allowing them to “manage their online life from any Internet connected device,” according to a release.

Cross-platform development, especially in the mobile sector, is something of a rare and difficult promise to make. Developing not only for the two most popular mobile OSes but also for desktops and web browsers is a time- and resource-consuming consuming proposition; but leaning on “all-in-one” dev tools can sometimes lead to messy results and spaghetti code.

Drund makes the promise of “single platform development,” saying that devs can create each app just once and deploy it to any web or mobile browser — including IE, FireFox, Chrome, Safari, and all the mobile browsers, too.

Granted, the app won’t be a native mobile or desktop app; still, even having a mobile app that works across all kinds of devices and all browsers is a fairly major accomplishment. In other words, if Drund even works a little bit, it would help to eliminate a lot of the hassles of multi-platform development.

There are no subscription fees for using Drund as a developer. This poses an interesting advantage to devs who currently shell out 30% of profits to the App Store for iOS app revenues; using Drund and creating mobile-web apps, they would entirely bypass the App Store and the revenue split with Apple.

Then again, the downside is that devs entirely bypass the App Store — and the Android Market, for that matter. As web apps, even mobile web apps, these bits of software lose the immediate access and exposure of the verified native-app marketplace.

Yet on the other hand, who’s to say that mobile web development rather than native apps isn’t a valid and growing path? HTML5 is playing a role in mobile web development, and as mobile web apps act more and more like native ones, choosing to develop for the mobile web makes more and more sense.

The company is currently seeking app developers “to make some sweet applications in Drund.” If you deign to give it a shot, by all means, we welcome your feedback; we’d love to hear good things about a cross-platform development tool like this one.

The User Side

For users, Drund sounds it fits perfectly with the cloud-computing concept of web apps (as opposed to websites) that come in marketplaces and stores and that can be ported from one device to another. The company says Drund gives users “the ability to put [their apps] all in one place that can be accessed anywhere the Internet is available, from any device, on any platform, and without installing software.”

The Drund platform for users also aggregates social media data, as it includes apps for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr and more. And Drund TV and Drund Music means you can also access Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Pandora, Rhapsody and Napster from your account.

In a word, this means that users can login once and access, use and manage all their apps from any connected device — a boon for app-ophiles, gadget freaks and others. And in practice, Drund looks a lot like the web-based OSes we’ve seen a lot of over the past couple years, with a friendly and familiar interface.