
Write your app in HTML5, upload it and get back app-store ready apps - geoffroy
https://build.phonegap.com/
======
adamjernst
I think PhoneGap is doing great work, they're obviously getting better, and I
don't mean to diminish what others have poured so much effort into.

But, are there any successful apps made with PhoneGap? Writing apps in HTML5
is constantly hyped, but there isn't a single HTML app out of the dozens on my
iPhone except Netflix. PhoneGap's app gallery doesn't have a single app I've
heard of.

(The Netflix app isn't too pleasant, either, unfortunately.)

~~~
domhofmann
The new LinkedIn and OkCupid apps are primarily HTML5 based. Not quite the
same, but every new release of the Facebook app seems to have more of its
existing views replaced by HTML5 counterparts.

~~~
flyosity
I'm fairly certain that the Facebook iPhone app does not UIWebViews to render
anything. Their fast-scrolling tableviews are painstakingly crafted from
scratch, natively, and (I believe) still use Joe Hewitt's framework for
complex view rendering. I know some guys on the Facebook iPhone app team and
they're die-hard Cocoa developers, I can't see them ever saying "screw it" and
using a UIWebView with HTML.

~~~
joehewitt
Some, but not all, table views were replaced with web views a few months ago.
News Feed is one example that is now HTML.

~~~
DenisM
Hm. How do you handle progressive loading? Do you even bother, or do you just
load up the entire news feed and let the WebKit struggle with keeping images
in-ram/in-cache etc?

~~~
wallflower
Netflix uses an interesting WebKit-based approach for progressive loading.

Basically, they reuse cells like UITableView does.

[http://cdn-0.nflximg.com/us/presentations/htmltvui/oscon-201...](http://cdn-0.nflximg.com/us/presentations/htmltvui/oscon-2011/Netflix%20Webkit-
Based%20UI%20for%20TV%20Devices.pdf)

~~~
DenisM
Thank you, good sir!

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Urgo
<https://build.phonegap.com/docs/ios-builds>

"Since PhoneGap Build uses Apple's standard development process to build
applications, you will need to sign up for their developer program to build
iOS applications on PhoneGap Build. _You will also need a Mac_ to configure
your certificate and provisioning profile."

:(

~~~
dkersten
Check out AppMobi[1], it may be what you need - at least, from my brief glance
at it, it looks like it: build iOS and android apps using HTML+JS, no need for
a Mac or the iOS developer kit. The core tools are free too, but they charge
for services such as compiling your program for iOS and such. They also have
something called DirectCanvas which is basically HTML5 canvas without the rest
of the browser cruft, for higher performance canvas apps (eg, games - they
have built in support for the Impact JS game engine, for example).

[1] <http://www.appmobi.com/>

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Limes102
I'm writing really a very large app for the company I work for. We're using
PhoneGap with HTML and JavaScript and have many plugins.

What we are not having problems with is the fact that we only really have a
single thread to do everything. All I can say is that I'm glad it wasn't my
idea to build it this way.

~~~
nupark2
This is a surprisingly often ignored limitation of the browsers. You _need_
threads to achieve decent performance given any significant complexity, and
mobile CPUs are going multi-core.

~~~
Limes102
Yep - Buttons are bad enough, but things like sliders are just the worst
things imaginable!!

I thought it might be worth looking into web workers, but everything seems to
interact with the DOM so that's not much help either.

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exratione
Speaking as someone writing a fairly major HTML5 iOS app using Jo and
PhoneGap: this looks like a very helpful way to take the make-work out of the
case where you have an app that uses no native functionality, and is not in
any way optimized for best appearance.

That's not a knock - a lot of people have that use case, and spend a lot of
time on their own systems for deploying to multiple platforms. Consider
internal apps, for example, that don't have to be massively visually slick and
polished.

But ... given the very large differences between even similar platforms, and
even between versions of platforms, you're not going to be getting much from
this if you are building ultra-slick apps in which you really do need
consider, say, how hardware acceleration or browser quirks fit into the
picture.

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anothermachine
Nice, and I use PhoneGap for Android, but you lose all the niceties like
access to hardware buttons (which means you convert limited screen space to
menus) and keyboard and intents and whatnot.

I had to write some plugins to get my game working on Android (and there are
still compatibility problems around opening intents), so PhoneGap apps
definitely lose something in the usability department.

And of course animations are not successful in this environment.

Ads are a pain too, if that's important to you, with the Google Admob/Adwords
migration happening and the mobile web vs app ambiguity.

PhoneGap seems helpful as a part of the app's main UI, but native chrome is
still important to completing an app's functionality and usability. I don't
see how Build solves that use case.

Still, it's a niche.

~~~
sunsu
The menu button, back button, and search button all work with Phonegap. What
version are you using?

<http://docs.phonegap.com/phonegap_events_events.md.html>

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zerostar07
Wasn't there a time when apple rejected phonegap apps? (they did reject one of
mine for sure).

~~~
anothermachine
Yes. Policy changed in 2009.

<https://code.google.com/p/phonegap/downloads/list>

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ggoodale
Great service - I've used it to build a modest application or two for Android
and iOS. One caveat: Phonegap plugins that include native components (for
example, the Facebook plugin) can't be included in apps built with Phonegap
Build (yet).

~~~
drzaiusapelord
What plugins have you been using? Last time I look at pg, the plugins I found
were alpha quality or just abandoned. I'd love to hear what's current. Thanks.

~~~
ggoodale
At the moment, just the Facebook plugin for Facebook Connect authentication.

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pbreit
I started looking at PhoneGap but wasn't happy with Jquery Mobile for the UI.
I am now trying out Titanium which offers a similar promise of ease for
web/Javascript developers but with more native UI elements. So far so good but
developing in Aptana/Eclipse-based Titanium Studio is a drag.

The more "consumer" your app the more likely it needs to be mobile. But I
think there is probably a large class of apps where PhoneGap/Titanium make
sense. Definitely in the internal business category where the audience is
finite and the look-and-feel is secondary to the functionality and cost/ease
of development and maintenance.

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dendory
This site is awesome. To try it out, I made a quick one page app, uploaded it,
made signing keys, and got it to the Android Marketplace, all inside of a few
hours. My first mobile app ever.

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pmdan
This is my favorite example of an expertly-made PhoneGap app:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pCtD4GuAqE>

So smooth.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Nice. Anyone know how they achieved the transition effect? It's not a simple
CSS3 transform. The bottom of the page seems to move first, then the top of
the page is dragged over.

~~~
doctoboggan
It could be an artifact of the scanning used in the video capture. The image
has moved between the time the top pixels and bottom pixels were recorded. I
believe this is known as aliasing.

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ashrust
Maybe I'm missing something but given you write the app in HTML/JS it must be
difficult to unit test your wrappers for the phonegap functions, as I assume
you can't simply pull up your dev site from the phone's browser. I'm thinking
particularly about things like the contacts or network status functions.

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gto16108
Phone Gap paired with sencha would make one seriously native-feeling iPhone
application. And all HTML5? Beautiful.

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forkrulassail
Beta code pretty please?

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toblender
Funny I just released an application using this method yesterday. Too bad the
Apple sales reporting site is down. I wanted to see how well HTML5 Apps sell.

<http://defyent.com/#astro-dating>

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vinhboy
Is there like a demo app with code I can look at? Thanks.

~~~
jberryman
$ git clone <http://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-start.git>

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Rotor
Very curious to see how they implement this tool.

I would think there would have to be some type of "compiler hints" for
particular app device builds.

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designium
QUESTION: Is there a good tutorial about creating PhoneGap apps integrated to
Rails apps?

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czzarr
how different is this from strobe ?

~~~
dannyr
You still need PhoneGap to build an iOS/Android app.

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nithinag
this looks cool!

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wavephorm
Upload your website, download a native app.

What is wrong with this picture? If you can build your app as a web app and
don't require hardware access then I'd think twice whether a native app is
required.

~~~
dpcan
It's about being found in the app stores. That's where people look for stuff
on their phones, that's where you need to come up if you have something you
want on someone's phone.

Of course there is a lot of down-side to this, but it is what it is. I wish
the App Stores, particularly the Android Market, would create a much more
elaborate system of categories allowing people to narrow their browsing down
to exactly what they want, then it wouldn't matter so much if there was a lot
of useless crap in the app stores, because we would never see it.

~~~
rhizome
This brings up an interesting point: is there anecdata regarding appstore
presence being a gateway/entry-point for a website? That is, first the app,
then the website?

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Hisoka
I may be ignorant, but to write a complex app, don't you need HTML5 AND a
mobile javascript framework like JQuery Mobile and Sencha? Or does HTML5
handle that too? If it does require a Javascript framework, that's when the
quality deteoriates... I think imitating the look and feel of native apps is
easy. Making the performance smooth on the other hand is hard.

~~~
jbail
HTML5 _is_ JavaScript. Without JavaScript, HTML5 is just a few semantic HTML
tags (like header and section) and a few extra form input attributes (like
required and placeholder).

As far as JavaScript frameworks go, you could use Sencha or jQuery Mobile or
one of the other few dozen frameworks out there --- or you could roll your
own.

I've been doing mobile web development for about a year now. I've done both
PhoneGap and over-the-air mobile web/native apps (with embedded webviews that
load HTML/CSS/JS from the web when requested). Both types of apps accepted by
Apple and in the Appstore as well as in the Android Market. I would recommend
rolling your own and not trying to imitate the look of native apps. One of the
strengths of using HTML5 is that you can create a custom look and feel that
doesn't look like every other app out there.

Since you mentioned Sencha and jQuery Mobile, here's what I think having used
both:

Using Sencha is nothing at all like using HTML5. You don't even write HTML or
CSS. You write JavaScript that uses Sencha's classes/methods. The look and
feel very much tries to mimic native and they do a pretty good job at
it...except that most widgets look like they were ripped from an iPhone, which
is disorienting for users on Android. That said, you get good performance and
a boatload of widgets/ui controls out of the box. The price for this is a
large, multi-hundred kb framework and a commercial license.

jQuery Mobile doesn't really try to look native and it really doesn't "feel"
native either. jQuery has it's own ui controls that more or less look
identical on iPhone or Android. With jQuery Mobile, you do write HTML and have
a more transparent view of that as well as of the CSS. But, you have to write
HTML the "jQuery Mobile way" to utilize the UI built into the framework. You
don't get as many widgets and ui-controls as you do in Sencha and overall, the
look and feel is not of the same caliber either. But, it's smaller than
Sencha, has your standard MIT license and is more easily modified.

Neither is perfect and both have pluses and minuses. If you know some HTML,
CSS and JavaScript, you will absolutely get better performance and and a
smoother look and feel by rolling your own light JavaScript for your app that
does just what it needs to do.

If you'd like to see an example app I built using PhoneGap and handrolled
HTML/JavaScript/CSS, you can download Easy Baby from the Android Market. It's
free. You'll find a link to it on my website: <http://newbabysleep.com>

~~~
FooBarWidget
I can't see why anybody would actually use jQuery Mobile and Sencha for web
app development. I've tried them last week and they were impressive on a
desktop browser. On a mobile device, not so much. Both jQuery Mobile and
Sencha feel slow, very slow. The animations are choppy. Response times on
clicks are way too long. Everything flickers like mad. Focus borders are drawn
at all the wrong places. I can actually feel that it's a web app trying too
hard to be a native app. On my Android phone it's even slower than on my iPad
1.

I'm not blaming jQuery Mobile or Sencha. I think mobile browsers are just not
ready for delivering a smooth UI experience that's up to par with native apps.

~~~
DenisM
Somehow we ended up with very different experiences. I played with Sencha
Mobile Kitchen Sink demo on the iPhone 4 and it was quite impressive.
<http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/demos/>

Yes, it lags ever so slightly, but faster CPU in iPhone 5 should take care of
that. My only other complain is that they messed up calculating tap areas for
tabbar/toolbar items - Sencha has tap area equal to the visual size of the
button, whereas UIKit assigns entire section of the toolbar (44 pixels tall in
portrait), which makes a lot of difference in tap detection. But I don't see
why they can't fix it, and then it would be pretty good...

To be clear, I am still staying away from UIWebView in favor of UIKit, but I
am getting increasingly interested in this.

~~~
nupark2
_Yes, it lags ever so slightly, but faster CPU in iPhone 5 should take care of
that._

This is _always_ the reply of web developers -- even on the desktop! "Yes,
it's slow now, but it'll be faster with new hardware!".

Meanwhile, the native applications use that additional processor power to _do
more stuff_ , and the webapps fall further behind again.

~~~
DenisM
So? Desktop HTML/JS was too slow for a while, all the way until the point when
it became fast enough to handle maps, email, finance etc. Remember MapPoint?
It used o be a desktop map application. No one uses it anymore.

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diamondhead
Is there any way to get an iOS development license using no Apple device?

~~~
unfed
nope

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infocaptor
How much effort needed to convert my single html with few javascript files to
be app-store eligible. I think there is more to just using the phonegap
<http://www.mockuptiger.com/a/123wireframe.php>

~~~
jakejake
cool web app. i think the difficult part of converting it for mobile would be
the screen size necessary to work effectively and possibly getting the touch
gestures to work properly for moving and resizing the controls.

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ricardobeat
Am I back to 2010? Or am I reading Reddit?

