Over the last six months, I’ve been examining and testing a variety of mobile app builders and mobile back ends. In some cases, the app builders and back ends were part of a single product. In other cases, the app builders or back ends stood on their own.

In this roundup, I’ll summarize seven products that are at least partially a mobile app builder. Some have IDEs that run locally on your computer; others give you a Web IDE that lives in the cloud. Some are aimed at enterprise development, others at individual developers or even students.

As we’ll see, they can have almost any level of complexity for the developer, ranging from drag-and-drop simple like EachScape, NSB/AppStudio, and Salesforce1, to providing an API for the developer to code against in Xcode or Eclipse, which is the way Appcelerator supports native SDK developers.

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