I've had mixed feelings on all of this for a while. I think as developers, we're all keenly aware that there's just no silver bullet. I can't say I'd necessaril

I've had mixed feelings on all of this for a while. I think as developers, we're all keenly aware that there's just no silver bullet. I can't say I'd necessarily always steer others away from PhoneGap, because it may be perfect for their project and team. But as mentioned, the abstraction remains very leaky; you still have to deal with a lot of pretty frustrating scenarios that can just eat away your time. I've also found performance to be an issue, especially if you're using animation-heavy UI to try and simulate a native experience. Lately I prefer Xamarin's approach. The downsides have been discussed in this thread: cost, and you lose some of that open source advantage (also perhaps binary bloat--I haven't had a chance to check that out). But I think writing views separately but having common core logic, networking, etc., meshes well with how I want to work. HTML5 is great, and I enjoy using it for web sites. But I've just never been able to get fully satisfied with it in the app space. Maybe someday! In short, saving time is a worthy goal, surely, but producing the best quality output you can is also a worthy goal, and those two have to be balanced as appropriate for any given project. I feel that PhoneGap leans a little too much in one direction and I'm hoping Xamarin can help me find the sweet spot.