
Ask HN: Best Open Source Phonegap and Titanium Apps? - candeira
I&#x27;d like to look at good (not only full-featured, but also well designed) cross-platform mobile applications. I&#x27;m not so much interested in games as in apps that need to conform to the conventions of each platform&#x27;s mobile UI. What open source apps using Phonegap, Titanium Appcelerator or similar have you admired recenty?
======
IbJacked
Are Phonegap and Titanium the preferred way to go for cross-platform mobile
development? If not, what are people using these days? (I don't want to hijack
this Ask HN, so please ignore my question if I already have a couple of
replies.)

~~~
shortstuffsushi
The company I work for recently decided to develop some cross-platform apps.
After researching a few different things, we decided Cordova (Phonegap, but
not branded) best fit our needs.

Aside from Titanium, we also looked at MonoTouch[0] and Xamarin[1], which I
believe (didn't completely read through) is built on both Cordova and Mono.

If you were building from scratch, maybe another one of those would make sense
for you. We are working within an existing project (mixed native and webview),
and Cordova seemed to best fit our requirements there.

[0] [http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page](http://www.mono-
project.com/Main_Page) [1] [https://xamarin.com/](https://xamarin.com/)

~~~
tlarkworthy
Did you evaluate cocoon? On my tests that was the fastest although a little
buggy. I think if I built from the ground up targeting that it would be the
best?

[https://www.ludei.com/cocoonjs/](https://www.ludei.com/cocoonjs/)

~~~
kayoone
Isnt cocoon canvas and webgl only?

~~~
tlarkworthy
oh yes. I do mainly games so that huge restriction doesn't register with me
sometimes.

------
marknutter
Untappd is a quite successful phonegap app:
[https://untappd.com/](https://untappd.com/)

Here's a talk the founder gave about using phonegap:
[http://phonegap.com/blog/2013/11/13/untappd-phonegap-
perfect...](http://phonegap.com/blog/2013/11/13/untappd-phonegap-perfect-
pint/)

~~~
dan1234
Untappd is one of those apps with an uncanny valley. It feels not quite native
because some of the gestures and view transitions are slightly off vs a 'true'
native app.

~~~
marknutter
And yet, it seems not to matter. The only people who are going to notice that
"uncanny valley" are app developers.

~~~
joesmo
I'd say this applies to all good non-native apps. The whole native vs. non-
native debate is completely moot from a consumer point of view. It does,
however, keep developers employed.

------
goatforce5
Ionic is a relatively new framework that plays nicely with PhoneGap to help
you produce pretty looking apps that behave similarly to native apps. It is
"open source front-end framework for developing hybrid mobile apps with
HTML5."

[http://ionicframework.com/](http://ionicframework.com/)

They have some sample code:

[https://github.com/driftyco/ionic-
weather/](https://github.com/driftyco/ionic-weather/)

[http://codepen.io/ionic/public](http://codepen.io/ionic/public)

And a showcase of apps built using their framework:

[http://ionicframework.com/examples/showcase/](http://ionicframework.com/examples/showcase/)

~~~
fidotron
They all look very iOS-like.

Does it support Android UI style?

------
general_failure
I have actually tried Cordova for my app using angular and ionic. We failed
miserably.

We kept hitting cases where we need something from native and we had to write
native plugins. Developing native plugins is no fun task and in fact very
painful to develop.

So we then tried writing native apps. We actually did it faster with
developing a separate iOS and Android app. We are very happy with the result.
The big bonus was that we are now able to conform to platform UI interactions
better now (ionic does things in a very iOS way). The debugging facilities
with native apps are way more awesome than cordova (which hardly has any on
android. and it's hard to debug cordova stuff on ios too)

~~~
shortstuffsushi
We're experiencing this quite a bit, and have only been in development several
weeks. After writing native for so long, I just feel so dirty having to create
a plugin for every little thing I need, and the code becomes callback hell
since plugin execution is asynchronous...

~~~
general_failure
And the terrible thing is the plugins integrate very badly with the
Cordova/plugman toolchain. We have plugins in separate repos. The repos itself
cannot be compiled by themselves because they are just source code without any
app code. I found no best practices on how to do this.

Anyway good riddance of Cordova/phonegP

------
valevk
A quick search on github [1] revealed a few known apps. Unfortunately, I can't
say whether those are the best open source apps written in Phonegap.

wikimedia/WikipediaMobile [2]

wildabeast / BarcodeScanner [3]

[1]
[https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=phonegap&ref=cmdform&s=st...](https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=phonegap&ref=cmdform&s=stars&type=Repositories)

[2]
[https://github.com/wikimedia/WikipediaMobile](https://github.com/wikimedia/WikipediaMobile)

[3]
[https://github.com/wildabeast/BarcodeScanner](https://github.com/wildabeast/BarcodeScanner)

------
cannuk
I am surprised no one has mentioned steroids js from appgyver
([http://www.appgyver.com/steroids](http://www.appgyver.com/steroids)). It's
sort of a blend between titanium (native controls with a javascript api) and
phonegap. That way you can write a truly hybrid app. I've played around with
it a bit and I have to say that it seems like the best of both worlds. Plus
the documentation and onboarding is stellar.

~~~
navs
I'm surprised I never came across this before. Thanks for this. I'll be giving
it a try on my next project.

------
jchrisa
I created an example app using our embedded JSON sync database. Maybe someone
would find this as a good introduction to data-driven apps on PhoneGap.

[http://docs.couchbase.com/couchbase-lite/cbl-
phonegap/](http://docs.couchbase.com/couchbase-lite/cbl-phonegap/)

------
TeeWEE
Rdio is an app written in Titanium, I really like it. However, you notice its
not fully in new-style nadroid without the native DrawerLayout. HTML5 is
really not good enough for killer mobile apps.

~~~
joewrong
What does HTML5 have to do with Titanium Android?

~~~
mrharrison
Yes, Titanium isn't a web wrapper. It could be, but its a native build via a
js api framework.

------
tluyben2
We found that both Xamarin and Corona work really well depending on your
needs; much better than Cordova for practically anything. Because sometimes
clients demand it we have used Cordova and Appcelerator in the past but now we
simply refuse; it creates horrible stuff which feels and looks bad unless you
sink so much time in it that you could've written in natively for every
platform 10x over. It's ok for fast prototyping but actually both Xamarin &
Corona beats them there easily too.

------
antoinec
[http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-
html5-l...](http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-
story/)

~~~
camus2
good,now where is the source ? oh wait,there is none.

------
Zigurd
The Wikipedia mobile client is a Phonegap app. But it, and most such apps, are
basically more-elaborate Web wrappers around a Web site's content. While they
might adequately not offend each platform's conventions, they are not
exemplary w.r.t. platform UI capabilities. It would be very hard to make a
cross-platform app that uses Fragment and multiple layouts in a way that
really captures the power of those UI capabilities.

~~~
yuvipanda
I would hardly call the current Wikipedia app 'best' \- it is rather quite
terrible. I'd know, since I wrote most of it :) We're rewriting it all to be
completely native now.

Edit: Link to the new source: [http://github.com/wikimedia/apps-android-
wikipedia](http://github.com/wikimedia/apps-android-wikipedia)

~~~
Zigurd
It was one of the few widely used open source Phonegap apps I could think of.
I agree going native is the right answer. There are some cases where a cross-
platform app is the right answer on all platforms, but that's a pretty narrow
set of cases. If an app is fairly popular, it's worth doing a native
implementation.

------
brandynwhite
Our [http://wearscript.com](http://wearscript.com) project for Glass and
wearables has some similarities to phonegap (we called it GlassGap at one
point) but has different design goals (e.g., live coding, pub/sub
communications between devices, etc).

------
kinur
Appcelerator is realy (totaly) free? I like this platform but I doubt about
the license.

~~~
iLoch
You SHOULD doubt it, last I checked their licensing was really shady. I'd stay
away from Titanium for commercial products.

~~~
kinur
Why iLoch, which thing in particular?

