For example, creating a Paint or Calculator application on mobile. Are there any notable downsides to using Defold’s game engine technology rather than a more conventional approach?
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I wish to know opinions about this too. The only particular issue I’ve found by using a game engine to make business apps is that you are running a rendering update at 60FPS or 30FPS all the time. Is this acceptable?
Those who have work with Xcode or Android tools know if “normal” apps use a more passive approach based on events that repaint the screen when is needed instead of using a fixed frame-rate?
Btw @WhiteBoxDev there is a native extension for drawing pixels: Draw Pixels (Native Extension)
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Right, that’s generally what I’m getting at. I’d also like to know if using Defold would be a significant detriment to battery life compared to Android or Xcode projects. Defold is just so simple to work with and has some great GUI assets available for making less game-related applications.
I don’t know of many examples of Defold used for app creation, but I guess it would be possible.
There’s a couple of interesting things I’d like to see someone experiment with.
- A native extension with full support for Dear ImGui. It would make it a lot easier to create very advanced UI. @sven did some experiments but never completed them.
- A native extension with which you could create true native Android and iOS components and interact with them from Lua scripts.
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The project @Pawel presented to the Jam is an app, right? Maybe he has some thoughts about this.
I don’t see any shortcomings on using Defold for app development as it is a pretty optimized engine so I don’t think it presents an issue to battery life.
So, if Godot users use the engine for making apps, why not doing the same with Defold; I don’t think Godot should be specially kind with battery btw.
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Can confirm that it’s suitable for making apps. I made an incomplete save editor for sm64ex, and it works quite well.
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Yes, Defilm could be definitely perceived as an app (not completed though) and its development was cool because I love Defold GUI system - detecting input and handling it is very easy, managing UI layout is superb and everything is modifiable to suit my needs. I used Gooey as helper (and modified it for my needs with ease), but there is also an awesome Druid library, I’m testing recently 
Earlier I made an app that was simply a To-Do list + Pomodoro Timer + Habit tracker (never released it, because there are thousands of similar and many better apps, but it was a frutiful and useful lesson 
) and it was really cool, again, because of Defold GUI + easy integration with Playfab and saved files, regardless of OS. Yes, I used Playfab, but I’m not recommending it for apps, there are better solutions for sure and maybe recent collaboration with Heroic Labs will allow to use for this purpose Nakama
So, yeah, making an app is definitely possible with Defold, especially because of its truly cross-platform development, ease of testing on mobiles and on desktops as well. 
Hmm, I guess this is obviously to consider, though in many apps constant frame rate could be even useful It depends on what you want to achieve in the end
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I think to control the frame rate, you can play with sys.set_update_frequency() and sys.set_vsync_swap_interval() and measure the performance accordingly.
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