Phonegap 2.0 released | Hacker News Reader

Phonegap 2.0 released

phonegap.com

115 pointsindianburger37 comments

Used Phonegap on 2 projects and I have to say, never again. If you want to have the job done right and you want a quality product, go native. We lost days(weeks even) of time chasing an obscure bug in the location tracking of Phonegap. Also, the end result wasn't very good to be honest. It lacked the fluidity and responsiveness you have with native apps.

sure, you can develop things 2 as fast but then you spend all the rest of the time just messing around to get that "native feel".

seconded

>It lacked the fluidity and responsiveness you have with native apps.

Having only messed around with phonegap a little recently, I wasn't sure if this was a real issue or something I was doing wrong. Is the lack of responsiveness you describe a noticeable delay any time you try to interact with the app in any way? I made a trivial app that just has two pages, and switches between them when you click a button, and it was obviously, noticeably slow to react. Is that "normal" phonegap performance? I guess I am just hoping I did something wrong, because I don't see how anyone could possibly use phonegap if it really is that slow all the time.

While there are performance issues in Webkit vs Native, for the trivial example the issue is usually the default delay in generating a 'click' event. Browsers wait 300ms to see if you're attempting a doubletap. You want to use a framework, or write some code to detect 'touchstart' for clicks to register with a minimum of delay.

See https://developers.google.com/mobile/articles/fast_buttons

I've used it on a couple myself, paired with Sencha Touch, and I have to say it has been overall a very good experience. We were able to put out an Android and iOS version of our app in 2 months. Performance on older Android devices wasn't great, but on newer phones like the iPhone 4+ and Androids shipped within the last year, performance was damn close to native.

Couldn't agree more. At the company I work for, we tried both Phonegap and Appcelerator Titanium and it both was a total disaster. We're back developing native apps and both the development and user experience is just so much better.

I agree. I spent about a few weeks cobbling together a prototype, but most of it was spent trying to get it look and feel native. That plus debugging is a nightmare.

When you have a team that has no Obj-C/iOS development experience, you'll lose more than a couple of weeks. We have one Java guy on staff, and he's never touched Dalvik. Our usage of Sencha Touch has produced relatively good results. The sheer force required to write a native app for multiple platforms is too costly. If I hit a case that I can't handle in JS, I won't take the job.

Not all apps use native controls. Not all apps should be built on PhoneGap.

At my company, we need to build apps rapidly. By rapid, I mean 1 week for a testable product. I have a app skeleton that implements backbone.js and some "native" css controls ready to go. I can easily turn around an app in that time.

Is it as fast as native? No. Do most people notice that? No. Does it prove the app concept we were trying to test? Yes.

So we basically use it as a prototyping platform and if the app has a lot of users, we'll go native. From my experience, it's much faster to prototype in html5 than it is in obj-c.

you're describing a totally different scenario, as a rapid prototyping tool I can totally see why you would choose Phonegap over native code. but as something to give to the end user? not so much.

Although with Interface Builder and some wiring you can quickly mock something up as well. But it probably would go faster in Phonegap to go from PSD to app.

I don't agree 100% with most people not noticing though. I do feel a smooth app adds to the overal experience.

I tested the first app they showed in the Phonegap gallery and it has that typical Phonegap feel to it: laggy response and glitchy transitions. It gives the app a sloppy feel. Maybe people won't notice, but it's not a fun app to use.

This has also been my experience. Phonegap should work for the subset of apps that could have just been done as a mobile app to start with. If you need to do anything that might push the device native is the only way to go.

It's a shame that phones still can't properly handle web views well. My company went with PhoneGap and tried implementing webviews but no matter what, couldn't develop an app that ran well enough on phones. The folly of PhoneGap isn't really PhoneGap's fault, but their premise. Phones are NOT ready for Html5 apps. Tried. Failed. Now rewriting the entire app natively.

can you give some insight as to what specific issue you were having? Was it HTML5 that was the real culprit? Or javascript performance? Did you try smaller javascript libraries, etc. etc.

I can't speak for the GP and I haven't used Phonegap but the problems I have encountered trying to use webviews in apps revolve around touch latency and animation. When a user touches an element on the screen they expect instant response and I haven't seen that in any app using web technology. Also, animation needs to be comparable to what you see natively. Even trying to scroll images without scrolling the whole view is a recipe for lag and choppiness. I don't want any part of that in my apps.

Google's solution for touch latency: https://developers.google.com/mobile/articles/fast_buttons

Having done multiple native apps on iOS, and a couple of phone gap based apps, the overwhelming flaw is that web apps don't _feel_ like native apps -- it's partially an HTML5, partially a js, partially iOS web view issue. It's the nuances that I as a developer notice, and I feel like my app is always 80% of what it could be, no matter which great 'new' library I try.

PhoneGap reminds me of the anecdote about a carpenter that sands the back of a bookshelf, "why do that" he gets asked, "no one will see it" and his response is "but I will." That's how I feel developing a phonegap app -- most people don't see the partially finished app; but I do.

One interesting new feature is the "Cordova Webview". This will make building hybrid apps much more straight forward.

"Cordova WebView - This allows for the integration of PhoneGap, as a view fragment, into a bigger native application."

On iOS I've done it before it was cool :) https://gist.github.com/3152851

I imagine this will alleviate some of the speed concerns: You can make most of your app native and the finnicky content parts PhoneGap.

I gave this a shot and am already having a huge amount more trouble working with the command line interface than I did with the > v1.9 xcode template.

The way it's put together is not elegant at all - it's used as a command line tool, but they just drop you a random folder which has the executables and a few other folders that the executable references, so it can't be copied to /usr/local/bin, nor can it be symlinked. So creating a new app for me was pretty unnatural.

On top of that, building it apparently can only be done from the command line and not inside of xcode, and it uses outdated xcode tools. The command line build required me to have the /Developer directory, which I do not have as it was no longer installed with Xcode from version 4 and up.

Really unhappy with this initially for a number of reasons. Don't get me wrong, I love working with the command line, and I like how rubymotion uses the command line so much working with ios apps, but I'm disappointed in how awkward this initial release is. I might just continue working with 1.9.0 until the next release.

I just downloaded the newest release and installed the DMG inside the zipfile, then went to the folder i downloaded and inside the /lib/ios/bin directory and ran ./create --args

When i press "run" in xcode i get a simulator with the app. Looks pretty smooth.

In terms of building, they offer this online as well, right?

Awesome news! They're developing Phonegap at a ferocious pace and I applaud the team for their progress. It was only a few months ago that they were at 1.7 and today's release of 2.0 is simply awesome.

Congrats Phonegap team!

Id tried phonegap in a project, completely disaster. Now in a new project for Android, we use the same concept as phonegap, a Javascript interface plus a WebView and JQuery Mobile with only the stuff that we need and we are having better results, although its not like a native app.

I've seen at least one unreleased product that has achieved almost a Path-like experience (dead serious) in Mobile Webkit Safari on the iPad 1, 2 and 3. It's doable and not as hard as you think once you, but it takes embracing everything modern browsers offer you and not building with backwards compatibility in mind. It has yet to be packaged in PhoneGap for the AppStore, but from my understanding the javascript engine available in PhoneGap apps is more performatic.

I would like some help with these:

- Is there support for inapp payments? Built in or plugin based?

- how does this compare with trigger.io and titanium?

- does this version not need xcode to create apps like trigger.io?

- http://bit.ly/OFM5cK

- Titanium at least still uses native UI. I believe that neither trigger.io nor PhoneGap do, though PG has a plugin to let you use some

- It requires XCode.

Congrats!

BTW I'm pretty sure Adobe took over PhoneGap to replace its AIR/Flash long-term debacle. Nice move.

PhoneGap:Build requires registration with either Adobe ID or Github :|

Phonegap is nothing more than a stopgap for people that can't afford iOS devs. I can think of no benefits for the end user. It's a sloppy solution. Better off just doing a mobile web app instead.

This is pure, unadulterated FUD. If your advice is to just do a mobile web app, what on earth is wrong with packaging it up into a phonegap app so that you can access a few extra APIs?

It's misleading.

Users have a higher expectation of quality from native apps than webapps.

Those expectations don't reflect reality. Look at the quora and linkedin apps. They are mostly web views and no one would even know if you didn't tell them. I will admit the performance characteristics of javascript are much more complex compared to objective-C, but the tradeoff is that you can share most of the code across platforms, and you can iterate much faster without app store approvals. On the other hand, if the mobile web was ready, phonegap would not exist at all. At the very least, it's more nuanced than one platform being superior than the other for any category of application, barring games.

In my experience, on an iPhone 4S HTML5 apps feel exactly as fast and responsive as native apps, and phones are only going to get faster.

How many apps have you developed in html5?

> Phonegap is nothing more than a stopgap for people that can't afford iOS devs. I can think of no benefits for the end user.

Getting the product sooner. After all, if getting the product sooner isn't a benefit, then the product probably isn't worth building.

Does it support Bluetooth yet?

Congrats!

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