Hacker News Reader

Comment by samcheng | Hacker News Reader

I wish them the best of luck, but it definitely looks like PhoneGap is losing to React Native. At least, everyone I know who wants to build a mobile app but doesn't want to invest heavily in Android and iOS expertise is building a React Native app.

The decline seemed to start with the Cordova mess, as the article notes.

Is anyone starting new PhoneGap apps these days?

View on HN

Can we try to make a list of solutions similar to React Native but without the React Part? I think it could be useful for people who need that kind of architectural solution without being accustomed to React.

e.g.: Weex, which uses Vue.js syntax - https://weex.apache.org/

I'm sure there are more.

I would love to see something Haxe based that worked across platforms, including the various desktops. It's pretty much there for games, there's just not good native widget support :(

Oh, nice, I hadn't heard of Haxe, I'm now reading more here https://haxe.org/

It doesn't have a good native gui story, but it does have a pretty good native graphics story - so it's a great fit for games.

It has the potential to be great for native guis if someone were to take the time to write the various bindings required, and probably a tool for building out the targets like the ones that exist for game/graphic oriented apps.

One more: Native Script, uses Angular or vanilla JS/TypeScript - https://www.nativescript.org/

I'm not sure what's the status of Titanium / Appcelerator[1], which was one of the first frameworks to compile to the native platform. Had used it in a project long ago. It had its own share of issues and buggy tools.

[1]: www.appcelerator.com

https://flutter.io/ (non-web, cross-platform, Dart)

It seems like Ionic (based on Cordova) is still around and kicking. I asked about a year ago in the Ionic community slack room if they were going to rebuild Ionic for React Native, but people there (including some Drifty employees IIRC) seemed more bullish on Ionic because it can be used in the browser to create PWAs. It seems like Expo is quickly becoming the Ionic (and more!) of React Native, but I don't think they are focused on targeting the web.

I can assure you ionic is kicking and doing quite well. Web development is a major market and the demand for doing more (i.e. mobile and desktop) with web dev skills only continues to grow (see: Electron for another example). We're hardly sitting by though, working on a lot of stuff we're really excited to share soon

(Posting the same reply to you as the sibling post.)

What if you have a web game (canvas) you just want to wrap as an app? Obviously I can't use React Native for that.

If it's web, keep it on the web.

I just started one with ReactJs on top of PhoneGap. The SPA was actually quite performant. I've moved to a PWA solution with ReactNative in stores though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com