4 ms·

This is worth repeating; use the right tool for the job. Phone gap is actually pretty great for the scenario where you need a simpler info screen app to be cros

This is worth repeating; use the right tool for the job. Phone gap is actually pretty great for the scenario where you need a simpler info screen app to be cross platform from day one. I made a personal app that way and it worked out great. The author sort of conflates Phonegap being bad for games for Phonegap being bad for apps in general. I think a lot of smaller companies would be better of going the hybrid route for things like food ordering or boutique shopping, etc. but there is this serious bias against it that I think 9 out of 10 times is more tribal/religious than for actual technical limitations.

rudedogg 10y ago
> there is this serious bias against it that I think 9 out of 10 times is more tribal/religious than for actual technical limitations I always feel like it's the opposite. People who haven't tried it themselves will say to use Cordova for everything, but once you start you notice the performance issues right away. It's frustrating because a lot of freelance jobs I see are asking for Cordova experts, and it's pretty obvious they're going to end up with a shitty app. But, no one is going to tell them that. They'll spend all their money getting a Cordova app made, and then look for a native developer when they realize how bad it is and have no money left. For background, I was learning JS development, and was really excited about Cordova. I thought Moore's law had finally put web based mobile apps (mostly) on par with native. But it's just not true, and I don't think it will be for a long time. I wish people would be more honest in their documentation about the limitations of things.
- wingworks 10y ago
  Agreed, when I first heard about PhoneGap it sounded amazing, then I tried and the performance hit is just too great, even for simple apps. Maybe in the future it'll be better, but not yet.
  - ahmetkun 10y ago
    This is what people have been telling since 2010. In the future with faster phones the difference will be negligible or something along these lines.
    - LeoNatan25 10y ago
      This reasoning has been a bust for many years. As hardware specs go up, so doES the native UI become more demanding. Compare iOS 6 to iOS 10, from translucency to animation complexity to text rendering complexity. Now take web technologies and try to emulate the same complexity - it becomes more and more prohibiting. If anything, it gets worse and worse, not better.
    - fjrieiekd 10y ago
      So battery usage doesn't matter to you?
- SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
  >People who haven't tried it themselves will say to use Cordova for everything, but once you start you notice the performance issues right away. I've developed a half dozen apps in Ionic Framework, and they all operate at a silky smooth 60FPS. I don't end up with performance issues because I'm: * Using CSS for animations * Not using JQuery for things you should never use JQuery for in 2016 because they're too slow on mobile * Not piling on tons of verbose frameworks to accomplish every little thing and therefore slowing down the JavaScript engine as it ends up with multiple megabytes of code * Limiting asset sizes so we don't overrun mobile memory limits * Generally optimizing the code so that I'm not wasting time or creating 16 intermediate arrays in every data conversion/manipulation because the functional approach looks so pretty I understand you were "just learning JS development." It may actually (ironically) take more of an expert to get good performance out of Cordova than it does to produce a decent native app. But everything I did above should also be standard practice for creating any web pages, since otherwise performance will in fact be crap on mobile. So it's really just web development best practices. No, it's not that there are limitations in Cordova. It's that writing web pages for mobile is harder than for desktop, but that when you do it right, it makes for a good app experience as well. Not to mention React Native and NativeScript, which will get you full speed on mobile with native controls.
  - rudedogg 10y ago
    I'll be a little more detailed. What I tried to do was make a game using Phaser. I didn't get past creating the loading and menu scenes before I starting noticing really bad sluggishness when first loading, etc. If you let it sit for 10 seconds then things mostly smooth out, but you still have the frame rate randomly drop, etc. I had done so little there was nothing to optimize, it was just the barebones to get something on the screen. And I didn't even try it on mobile, this was using my desktop/laptop. I see the same thing with CSS3 animations. There's this weird jerking, even on something simple like this: http://www.w3schools.com/css/tryit.asp?filename=trycss3_animation_speed http://www.w3schools.com/css/tryit.asp?filename=trycss3_anim... . When I enable the FPS meter I see drops to 30FPS. Also, I hadn't heard of Framework7 mentioned in another comment, so I checked it out. The demo apps I tried (http://framework7.io/apps/ http://framework7.io/apps/) have issues on mobile. I just feel like it's unfair to new developers who are going to invest a lot of time before they figure out hybrid apps have issues. I know people want to market/highlight how great their framework is, but it causes us all grief. We should be more upfront about what works well (CRUD apps), and what doesn't (games, animations, custom UI). I don't know enough about React Native to comment.

rudedogg 10y ago

> there is this serious bias against it that I think 9 out of 10 times is more tribal/religious than for actual technical limitations I always feel like it's the opposite. People who haven't tried it themselves will say to use Cordova for everything, but once you start you notice the performance issues right away. It's frustrating because a lot of freelance jobs I see are asking for Cordova experts, and it's pretty obvious they're going to end up with a shitty app. But, no one is going to tell them that. They'll spend all their money getting a Cordova app made, and then look for a native developer when they realize how bad it is and have no money left. For background, I was learning JS development, and was really excited about Cordova. I thought Moore's law had finally put web based mobile apps (mostly) on par with native. But it's just not true, and I don't think it will be for a long time. I wish people would be more honest in their documentation about the limitations of things.

wingworks 10y ago
Agreed, when I first heard about PhoneGap it sounded amazing, then I tried and the performance hit is just too great, even for simple apps. Maybe in the future it'll be better, but not yet.
- ahmetkun 10y ago
  This is what people have been telling since 2010. In the future with faster phones the difference will be negligible or something along these lines.
  - LeoNatan25 10y ago
    This reasoning has been a bust for many years. As hardware specs go up, so doES the native UI become more demanding. Compare iOS 6 to iOS 10, from translucency to animation complexity to text rendering complexity. Now take web technologies and try to emulate the same complexity - it becomes more and more prohibiting. If anything, it gets worse and worse, not better.
  - fjrieiekd 10y ago
    So battery usage doesn't matter to you?
SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
>People who haven't tried it themselves will say to use Cordova for everything, but once you start you notice the performance issues right away. I've developed a half dozen apps in Ionic Framework, and they all operate at a silky smooth 60FPS. I don't end up with performance issues because I'm: * Using CSS for animations * Not using JQuery for things you should never use JQuery for in 2016 because they're too slow on mobile * Not piling on tons of verbose frameworks to accomplish every little thing and therefore slowing down the JavaScript engine as it ends up with multiple megabytes of code * Limiting asset sizes so we don't overrun mobile memory limits * Generally optimizing the code so that I'm not wasting time or creating 16 intermediate arrays in every data conversion/manipulation because the functional approach looks so pretty I understand you were "just learning JS development." It may actually (ironically) take more of an expert to get good performance out of Cordova than it does to produce a decent native app. But everything I did above should also be standard practice for creating any web pages, since otherwise performance will in fact be crap on mobile. So it's really just web development best practices. No, it's not that there are limitations in Cordova. It's that writing web pages for mobile is harder than for desktop, but that when you do it right, it makes for a good app experience as well. Not to mention React Native and NativeScript, which will get you full speed on mobile with native controls.
- rudedogg 10y ago
  I'll be a little more detailed. What I tried to do was make a game using Phaser. I didn't get past creating the loading and menu scenes before I starting noticing really bad sluggishness when first loading, etc. If you let it sit for 10 seconds then things mostly smooth out, but you still have the frame rate randomly drop, etc. I had done so little there was nothing to optimize, it was just the barebones to get something on the screen. And I didn't even try it on mobile, this was using my desktop/laptop. I see the same thing with CSS3 animations. There's this weird jerking, even on something simple like this: http://www.w3schools.com/css/tryit.asp?filename=trycss3_animation_speed http://www.w3schools.com/css/tryit.asp?filename=trycss3_anim... . When I enable the FPS meter I see drops to 30FPS. Also, I hadn't heard of Framework7 mentioned in another comment, so I checked it out. The demo apps I tried (http://framework7.io/apps/ http://framework7.io/apps/) have issues on mobile. I just feel like it's unfair to new developers who are going to invest a lot of time before they figure out hybrid apps have issues. I know people want to market/highlight how great their framework is, but it causes us all grief. We should be more upfront about what works well (CRUD apps), and what doesn't (games, animations, custom UI). I don't know enough about React Native to comment.