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Comment by jmitcheson | Hacker News Reader

Why do people hate on PhoneGap so much? Specifically, I mean when people complain that the UI of the apps produced with PhoneGap don't "feel" right. PhoneGap sacrifices the quality of the UI for benefits in other areas (a boost to development speed, and making it easier for a novice developer to get started).

The argument against PhoneGap seems to be either that there isn't a place at all for such a technique, or that people think the benefits don't outweigh the drawbacks. Another option is that people dislike the developer accessibility aspect out of pure snobbery.

However, I rarely hear people making these arguments. I just hear (not necessarily in this thread, but in previous ones) "blah blah it sucks blah blah why not write native code blah blah".

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> PhoneGap sacrifices the quality of the UI for benefits in other areas

You said it yourself. PhoneGap is an easy way to get a sub-par user experience and that is what matters the most, not development speed.

That is hardly a universal truth. I'd take ugly code that ships on time over beautiful code that doesn't.

Ok Mark Zuckerberg. Shipped code does not always beat unshipped code if the shipped code is shitty. In App Store contexts, badly shipped code can kill your app before it gains any traction leaving future updates moot. Anytime you deliver less than a beautiful UX you are doing a disservice to the user. The product can be simple and MVPish, but you should never ship shitty code. Zuckerberg doesn't know what he's talking about.

The UX is the absolute most important thing. Anything that sacrifices the user experience just to make it easier to develop is a bad tool. It's a tool for the lazy.

Well, maybe, but this is also a great tool for the enterprise that wants a consistent look and feel across their supported range of devices with one code base.

Probably the biggest problem with PG is that it's frequently used with JQM, which in my opinion (after over a year of development with this combo) is slow. Mostly because it's browser compatibly goal is too broad.

I'd really like to see a mobile optimized version of twitter bootstrap for PG.

Great point. I started out with JQM early on and had to drop it. I ended up just pulling some of the touch event handling code from JQM since that was the only part still being used.

General statements are dangerous. UX is often but not always the most important part of a project. For projects where speed of development or cross platform support trump UX, PhoneGap can be an awesome tool.

in my experience more often than not the only people who can tell a well-done app is phonegap/cordova rather than native are nit-picky, self-righteous developers. if it works as advertised, users are generally happy and cannot tell the difference... and, unless your app is built specifically for developers, that's all that really matters.

No, they cannot say "this is not native, must be PhoneGap". They don't even know what "native" and "PhoneGap/Cordova" is. They just say "it's does not feel snappy/right" and that's it.

Are you stating that native apps are always snappy/right? Because if you are, I have a list of App Store apps for you to look at.

I've seen a pretty complex app which had been implemented a both a native iOS app, and as a PhoneGap app. The PhoneGap version launched faster and was smoother.

I suppose the lesson of the story is that the developers matter more than a the framework used.

I've noticed this, too. The arguments are more recently drawing around how the UX harms users...but wouldn't this be true of any HTML5 app? Does PhoneGap have some voodoo magic abilities to ruin the UX beyond what any HTML5 app is capable of? Otherwise, are you saying HTML5 apps are bad? PhoneGap is a wrapper that provides native-API to HTML5 apps. It doesn't automatically add horrible UI or whatever people think it does.

Crap PhoneGap apps and crap native apps are no different from each other.

Yeah, I deal with this on (almost) a daily basis. My response is, "I'm not LOOKING to emulate the iPhone interface. I design my own buttons and widgets" There is nothing that does a great job of emulating the iPhone interface. And even if you DO get close, it looks foreign on an Android device. As far as performance, all these kids that follow a few Obj-C tutorials and build a couple of forms in Xcode make me crack up. You're NOT gaining performance, you're probably leaking memory like crazy because you don't understand C very well. I agree with the sentiment of the snobbery. Hey, if you write Java and Obj-C at the speed that I can code a web app, great. But don't complain when mine looks nicer than yours... and the performance isn't THAT much different.

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