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"With all that, the last 20% of a Cordova app may well take 80% of development time, and that's rarely been budgeted in." To be fair, that could be said about
by soft_dev_person 11y ago
"With all that, the last 20% of a Cordova app may well take 80% of development time, and that's rarely been budgeted in."
To be fair, that could be said about most software projects. "80% done, now the last 80% remains."
Not that I disagree with you, I had the same experience trying to make an Android app in Phonegap. It's lacking, like most cross-platform frameworks (for most types of apps, but typically not games) I have tried. They are only suitable for basic stuff where the native feel isn't critical.
- pavlov 11y agoTo be fair, that could be said about most software projects. Yes, absolutely true. The difference here is between "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns", to paraphrase a certain renowned military strategist... With Cordova/PhoneGap, it's easy to get the initial impression that you're dealing with "known unknowns", just the typical web development project pitfalls -- "This is HTML, I know this stuff". When the "unknown unknowns" hit the fan, it's often pretty late in the development cycle, and so things blow past original estimates even though they were competently planned. It's just that the plan was for web development, not the shifting art of websites-in-drag-pretending-to-be-apps-development.
- jkestner 11y agoI agree with that. With an abstraction layer on top of a native layer, inevitably you have to go below the surface unless you fit the intended use case perfectly. I learned this lesson with the Objective C-Python bridge. Spent needless time mapping differences between the two to the point where I had to learn Objective C anyway.
- wpietri 11y agoI agree, but one minor nit: when major problems crop up "pretty late in the development cycle", this typically means a waterfall development cycle. Waterfall approaches are really only appropriate when there's nothing particularly risky. I plead with the HN audience: never let a manager choose the waterfall model by default. They often happen because they make contract negotiation easy. But that's only because they save all the trouble for later.
- touristtam 11y agoside comment: the rule is called the 90-90 rule [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule]