

PhoneGap Developer App Preview for Firefox OS - rnyman
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/09/phonegap-developer-app-preview-for-firefox-os/

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sudont
Curious to see how this works out, with JS being the native way to write
applications. Been excited about the Firefox platform because of this for a
while (especially for POS/embedded/tablet applications), but I'm developing a
cross-platform app for both iOS and Android in Ionic, and I'm much less
interested in PhoneGap now that I've actually done something with it. (I'm a
big proponent of Angular at work, it's not that part.)

I think I was able to get about 40% of the way there in about five hours in
Cocoa, the only real stumbling block was dealing with ViewControllers and
UITableViews. Unfortunately for non-native platforms, if PhoneGap is
positioned as a good starter for low-barrier apps, it doesn't bode well if a
developer can go in fresh and with about the same amount of effort build one
platform in whole, and about 20% of another...

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declan
I spent some time (>18 months ago) testing PhoneGap for potential use with
what would become [http://recent.io/](http://recent.io/), but PhoneGap was too
slow on actual devices to be usable. Launching a "Hello, world" app took
something like 30 seconds on an iPhone 3GS. Maybe hardware speed increases
have helped to fix that problem.

I haven't tested Ionic, though the Creator utility looks promising. Do you
have any experience in how well Ionic interfaces with native APIs, like
Twitter/Facebook on iOS and sharing on Android? And how do Ionic-built HTML
apps perform in terms of speed?

~~~
sudont
Creator does look great, but so does Interface Builder. IB has caused me to
leave the computer in a state of shock from frustration, so I'll have to
reserve judgement.

Performance is fairly good. I get around 5 seconds on a 4s, and about 8 on a
Nexus S, though I haven't tested with recent code on the Android Phone. The
only native API I've used has so far been push notifications. While there's a
plugin for that, it works as a pretty thin bridge between native code, and a
couple of dispatch functions that use stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString.
I've had to fix things, so it means having to understand Cocoa code anyway.

There are also some visual issues with the code, in that the view will save
its state if the user uses a route in a view to change the current view.
Normally this would help, but if it frequently updates the view changes back
and then it flickers.

Overall it's ok if you really love web tech, but I'm learning native iOS
development in response to my experience.

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neoyagami
We used phonegap for a big app for the world cup and discovered that phonegap
isnt ready for nothing serious, everything run slow, the plugins are a mess,
sometimes compilations fail w/o warning, the documentation is bad an never
acurrate, it was very frustrating, if you want some simple 1 page app. Its meh
but for everihing else its just horrendous( sorry my bad grammar)

