Why is it hard to do mobile at hackathons? Is it just because building an app on the mobile take longer than building a web app? But wouldnt solutions like phonegap make it faster?
Mobile and web development are different and have different mindsets. For example, mobile apps require a separation between the server and client - if you want to communicate with your server, you need to make an internal API instead of directly running SQL/MongoDB/etc calls. Also, in a mobile app, users may not have a data/internet connection, so developers need to implement persistant storage on user's devices to work offline. At this hackathon, it was about half mobile (maybe more) and half web.