

Comparing Titanium And PhoneGap - kwhinnery
http://kevinwhinnery.com/post/22764624253/comparing-titanium-and-phonegap

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abalone
Refreshingly honest, considering it's written by an appcelerator employee.

The main concern I have about either of these is that there are no awesome
ahowcase apps out there that prove they work well. There are quite a few awful
ones. I am attracted to titanium's promise of native look and feel, but the
author admits that there are unresolved performance issues and other
drawbacks. Phonegap seems even worse when compared to native UI.

What is the best nontrivial, well-performing titianium or phonegap app you
know of?

~~~
inkaudio
For a titanium example I recommend Wunderlist. It is used by millions of
people on multiple platforms, I use it everyday and it works well. Moreover
Wunderlist is a good example for hackers because it is open source:
<https://github.com/6wunderkinder/wunderlist>

main site: <http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist/>

One caveat, I'm not sure how many of the current apps (there are 5 versions
with an addtional blackberry app in private beta.) still uses Titanium, and
Wunderlist has been ported to platforms that are not supported by Titanium.
However I know that the first few releases did use Titanium.

~~~
ilja
The first Wunderlist for android was a Titanium app, but is was very slow and
unusable. They rebuild it again natively:
[http://www.6wunderkinder.com/blog/2011/09/05/wunderlist-
for-...](http://www.6wunderkinder.com/blog/2011/09/05/wunderlist-for-android-
rebuilt-relaunched-and-really-awesome/)

I think the IOS version is still Titanium?

A high performing Titanium example on android would interest me also.

~~~
JVIDEL
Got a link to the old one's APK file?

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simonrand
We have experience of building native Android and iOS apps, but have used
Titanium in the past to quickly prototype ideas, and it's proved a great tool
for that..

We recently however used Titanium for a full client project (an app to control
a home heating system), usual story, tight budgets/time/etc. We built the iOS
app in under 3 months and then ported to Android in about 3 weeks, very
pleased with the results, the app is now being widely used daily by many end
users..

Two points that should be considered though:

1\. You need to be very careful using Titanium, specifically in terms of
organising your layouts and how you organise/implement your code.. Both these
can make the app a pain to port and potentially dog slow and prone to crashes
on both platforms

2\. It's not going to work in every use case, there's limitations, mostly in
terms of speed (rendering long lists, some slight responsiveness issues, etc.)

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tworats
I started with an early version of Titanium, made a lot of progress very
quickly, but ended up hitting many bugs and performance and memory issues.

Each new version of Titanium made steady progress, but didn't really make for
a crisp, responsive app.

So I gave up, huddled down with a friend who knows PhoneGap, and rebuilt the
app in PhoneGap.

Well, it turns out there are just as many stumbling blocks with PhoneGap as
there are with Titanium - if you want a responsive, good looking app, you have
to jump through many hoops. I was trading off one set of headaches for
another.

I'm now back on Titanium. I've reworked the app significantly and am finally
getting to a happy place - it's responsive on both iOS and Android, and looks
good. Still a lot of memory usage, but no crashes, so perhaps it's not an
issue.

My take at the moment: PhoneGap gets you more platforms and has a lower
learning curve. However, it's hard (but possible) to make a native
looking/feeling app. Titanium is a pain and requires a lot of discipline in
your Javascript coding style, but you can get a nice native looking/feeling
app if you're willing to put in the time.

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kizza
My experience: Phonegap: Responsiveness is bearable on iOS but on Android it
is very slow - scrolling is choppy and there is a noticeable delay between
pressing a button and seeing it activate. We abandoned it at this point.

Titanium: The layout code seems to be different between iOS and Android so if
you get your app to look right in one platform it can be completely wrong in
the other. On Android it bundles the V8 Javascript library so it's definitely
not native code but at least with V8 the speed is not a problem. Titanium adds
about 10MB for its stuff which is annoying to me as an old programmer!

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ianhawes
Excellent article!

I've worked with Titanium since the very beginning and would absolutely
recommend it to anyone that wants to reuse pieces of their application between
iOS and Android. Granted, certain UI elements that exist on iOS with no
Android counterpart (and vice-versa) have to be adjusted, you're still able to
retain the vast majority of your code between both platforms.

The documentation has come a very long way too. It used to be that the
KitchenSink had to be forked in order to see examples of new features -
thankfully, that is no longer the case. The IDE that Appcelerator has shipped
(after purchasing Aptana) is extremely useful. As Kevin mentioned, the signing
tasks and other similar actions are handled by the IDE, so compiling and
testing is relatively simple.

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Imagenuity
The one thing this article doesn't even mention is that PhoneGap is free and
open source, and Titanium is expensive. Yes, Titanium has a free level, all
the other price levels listed on their website are 'Contact Sales'. When I
researched this last year, Titanium started just under $100/month and went
wayyyy up from there. I've since published an app on Android and iOS using
PhoneGap, and was happy with the result. Like any project, it takes a lot of
work make it polished and look good.

~~~
simonrand
Titanium is open source also (full source on GitHub), we've forked the SDK and
made our own modifications.. From what I know fees are for support and the
opportunity for Appcelerator accreditation, which isn't necessary in every
case..

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omfut
Great Article. I have been playing around with both PhoneGap and Titanium.
Definitely there is no apple to apple comparison between these products. Both
of them serve different purpose though similar in language and technology. Now
that PhoneGap( Apache Cordova) is part of Adobe, not sure about the long term
usage with respect to licensing etc.

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Hrvoje
Finally article with good explanation of differences. Most of comments I found
till now was that Titanium translates JS to native code, which sounded really
hard and almost impossible to me. Focus for these tools should be getting
native UI/UX look&feel, and it looks like Titanium has little advantage here.
Phonegap looks more RAD.

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skilesare
Can titanium apps be deployed to the web and exist on their own? Are there any
examples of this? One of the reasons I use phonegap is that for my smaller
customers with limited budget I can create a web app first and then after
success, deploy that same codebase (with limited branching based on the
device) to android and iPhone.

~~~
kwhinnery
We have a mobile web runtime platform also, though it is less mature than the
native ones at this point. You can do a hybrid app approach with Titanium as
well, if you like, and incorporate as few/many native UI components or APIs as
you like.

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neovive
Does anyone have experience wrapping a jQuery Mobile web application in native
web view? How does the performance of that stack (HTML5, JQM, native WebView)
compare to PhoneGap and Titanium. From previous articles, my assumption is
that the performance from slowest to fastest is: JQM > PhoneGap > Titanium >
Native.

~~~
tworats
I haven't directly experimented with JQM in a WebView, but based on my
experience with JQM on PhoneGap and Titanium in general I would not recommend
that path. JQM is slow enough on its own, and Titanium has its own performance
issues, so the two together would likely be a challenge.

If you're going for Titanium you might as well use native widgets instead of
JQM - otherwise PhoneGap is probably a better choice.

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KaoruAoiShiho
Can anyone comment on trigger.io?

~~~
kodablah
Although I have not used trigger.io personally it appears to be akin to
PhoneGap in the sense that it wraps a web view instead of using native
components. I also don't believe it is open source.

