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Comment by veeti | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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