Ask HN: Is phonegap/cordova still relevant?

I'm not a phone gap expert by all means, so I can't speak for it's new ability. But I wasn't very pleased with my experience when I did have to use it.

Now that Xamarin is free, it's very hard to say no to such a powerful tool.

I think Cordova is increasing in relevance. Over the last couple of years mobile devices have reached a level of performance that makes hybrid apps feel native. When you combine Cordova with Ionic you can create write-once apps that deploy to any device and have a native look and feel.

It's basically writing an angular app and sticking it on someones phone. Unless you're making a game, you can build some pretty powerful web apps and throw them into ionic to make an indistinguishable mobile app.

It's very much relevant. I've just built and released an app using Ionic 2. Nearing 25k users.

Check out Ionic 2. Build something quick. Test on your phone.

With the addition of React Native and Xamarin going free why would you? Hybrid apps will never feel native.

You can even go graphic intensive with RN, it doesn't muddy you up if you need to do stuff with swift/obj-c.

Cordova is still quite relevant.

The better question may be a question of developer balance. React Native (and similarly Xamarin) requires extra work per each platform where things don't quite overlap and native controls are different enough on the given platform.

In terms of balance for a small team, "raw" HTML5 on Cordova can still be a time saver for reaching all the platforms with the exact same UI. Admittedly, yes that's likely not a true "native" UI and will look/feel more like a "website", but for some projects that least common denominator is more important the time/developer effort of polishing the UI especially for each platform.

I'm very happy building a frontend for an ERP system with Vue.js that works with the same codebase on Cordova and on web browsers.

And currently my favorite Android app is a Hacker News client written in Cordova.

Would I use it to write a game? Anything that runs in the background? Something that needs to start instantly and die instantly? No. But it's a great tool if it's paramount to keep platform support overhead to a minimum and you need to have something identical or similar running in the browser.

The first thing you need to ask yourself is do you need an app in a native wrapper or a simple website ? 99% of the time you don't need a website. There is plenty of ways to make a website work offline on mobile.

Lots of people are still using Cordova (especially for enterprise apps) and in-app browser support is getting better all the time. There's a huge number of upsides to having a single codebase that works on Android, iOS and the web. Native will obviously give the best UX but comes at a high cost which you have to weigh up against other factors. There's a very vocal group online that will tell you hybrid apps are the worst thing ever but when you do a hybrid app well most people don't notice.

I've worked with Cordova, and in many cases, I don't think it's appropriate.

In particular, apps that:

* require native functionality (i.e. access to photos, GPS, notifications)

* are sufficiently complex UI-wise

... are not well served by Cordova. Why?

* when you start needing native functionality, you will find that the plugin ecosystem is often lacking; having to modify or write your own plugins means that you have suddenly have three languages (JS, Obj-C/Swift, Java) to contend with instead of two (Obj-C/Swift, Java)

* iOS and Android development kits make it easy to create apps that feel like they belong on their respective platforms — there is no need to spend developer or UI/UX looking for a library with lots of UI elements or developing a look/feel

Moreover, even relatively simple things like table layouts that "feel nice" — e.g. highlight when you tap on them, implement swiping to delete elements, allow for re-arranging — are significantly more onerous to implement in JS as opposed to natively.

If your app is sufficiently simple and doesn't fall prey to these pitfalls, you might want to consider Cordova. But if you really don't need native functionality, you might as well just get `UIWebView` working yourself.

A lot of “I’m not an expert, but let me tell you it sucks” stories.

Most people who actually do make money with Ionic/Cordova just go bazinga from these comments. So, I'm just gonna c/p what I wrote [here](http://tutorials.pluralsight.com/front-end-javascript/gettin...):

> ...at this point you may still say: Yeah, sure, but I've heard that React/Ember/NameYourPoison is way better. I will answer this question similarly as I did in a conference talk I gave a few months ago: Please just stop with the analysis paralysis already. Pick a framework (any framework for that matter) that the community is using, use it, and see how far it gets you. All these talks about X being slow or Y being better just make no sense until you try it yourself for your use case and preference.

With this said, I have to add that it would be unwise not to keep an eye on the 'latest and greatest' frameworks. So, please note that I'm not defending Ionic's honor, with all due honesty it has its problems (speed and lack of plugins to name a few - however, truth be told it has the most of the lot). And, if it's obvious that we would do way better with technology XYZ, I'd be the first to say 'K, no probs, let's learn and use it'. But, until Ionic (and soon Ionic 2) keeps showing results, I'll bet my money on that horse.

And now for a twist "heeey, but that NativeScript looks shineeeey!"

> Who are you, dude!? #3 at [StackOverflow in Ionic](http://stackoverflow.com/tags/ionic-framework/topusers), author of [Ionic book](https://leanpub.com/ionic-framework).

All my apps (responsive HTML) are served via HTTP and rendered via WebView() api for both iOS and Android

Ionic is pretty good, especially if you are a developer that knows angular already (even more so if a webapp is your main business and it's already in angular).

If you are not writing games, Ionic works really well, especially for shops with only a few developers.

I find that they are quite relevant.

In fact, I begin by prototyping all new app-ish projects as mobile web (twitter bootstrap).

Then, if we need better access to phone features (push messaging), I will simply wrap it in cordova.

Admittedly, I do have to fight with some plugins, but I try to not stray too far from well supported ones.

Also, you should know that you can get 60 frame/second on canvas. There are may casino slot style games that do just this. I believe flipboard does as well?

Depends on what do you want to achieve?

We utilize Cordova heavily in product I am working on, but more on a meta-layer, meaning, that user is able to create his simple application with drag-drop ui, see a preview in browser and then package it to a phone-installable file. We even had integrations for apparmor/apperian, so that the user is able to upload the app to their corporate app management right away.

If I were to build a single app, I would go native. Or xamarin, because I used it already, know how to get around its quirks, and like C# :)

Absolutely! Despite critics, they can feel native due to increasingly better phone hardware and picking a good framework (KendoUI Mobile, Ionic, React Native, Xamarin). I use KendoUI Mobile and Knockout.js for mine currently, with plans to probably switch to Ionic someday. Users don't care what the tech is - it's about the experience. I've sold over $100k in apps over 3 years... just launched an Untappd beer app if you're curious - www.getBeerSwift.com.