What makes it really bad is that there is also this bug in mobile WebKit from four years ago that nobody has ever gotten around to fixing:

http://blog.johnmckerrell.com/2007/03/07/problems-with-safar...

Basically if you are at or near 100% CPU, Safari’s HTML parser silently fails to parse your HTML.

Additionally, we have found this is not limited to the innerHTML property; we have observed the problem to happen with the W3C recommended method Range.createContextualFragment.

EDIT: formatting and cleanup

I had a big problem with HTML not parsing in phonegap. It was intermittent but far more often than I would expect for near 100% CPU. This fix on stackoverflow solved the problem entirely for me: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3644474/calls-to-update-d...

My own PhoneGap-based iPad app is going really well so far, practically indistinguishable from native, but for one thing: WebKit refuses to let you have manual control over hiding and showing keyboards. (I tried filing a bug, and it was closed as "works as intended".)

This makes me feel like I have one hand tied behind by back when creating UI flow, and it's maddening.

Do you have a link to your app? I'm really interested in seeing web apps that work similarly to native apps, I've yet to see a great example yet.

Alas, it's still under development, several weeks away from release at best.

The biggest reason it feels native is that I'm attempting very little imitation of the iOS interface chrome. Other than a menu bar at the top and some text boxes as needed, everything is touchable graphics. It doesn't look or act anything like a web page; for instance, the click "shadow" never appears, and you can't scroll the page out of bounds (although there's a WebKit input box bug with that, too).

I'm working on a phonegap app at the moment. I definitely wouldn't say it looks native - I haven't really tried for that - but it is fast. You do have to be very careful about performance issues, but phonegap does make it exceedingly easy to incorporate native code if that is required. I would say, purely as a limited anecdote, that jquery mobile and other frameworks just weren't really fast enough for the performance I wanted to see.

Are you using any Javascript plugins at all? Regular jQuery, Zepto, Backbone, etc?

Regular jquery, jqote2, Kelvin Luck's jquery date picker, jquery autoresize plugin (though its not really working out so far) and all the phonegap javascript functionality.

It sounds like most of these complaints are about mobile Safari and not specific to Sencha's libraries or PhoneGap.

True, to an greater extent, Ive rolled things together but I do try and not apportion the blame fully, by saying...

"The title may present a slightly unfair impression. Not all of these issues have anything to do directly with the PhoneGap or Sencha Touch codebase, but are simply limitations of browsers, web-views and performance of mobile devices, though Sencha Touch / Phonegap framework does inherit those problems (and go to some lengths to work round the issues)"

But there are defects and issues in both PhoneGap and Sencha Touch that I mention. But I also recognise that they are both doing a good job on balance to further the cause.

Updated with a video of the scroll lag problem http://youtu.be/EEMCqqyeEDY

The irony is... running back to native platforms because the web sucks is exactly why the web still sucks.

On the contrary, there is plenty of desire build cross platform applications on the web as evidenced by this article. How would this developer sticking to Sencha/Phonegap against contrary evidence improve the web for others?

Well, I am still plugging on with HTML5! for now, even if I am now wiring in iScroll4 to compensate for the poor scrolling of long lists!

I'm skeptical. You're saying that if more application developers just allowed their apps to suck, the Web would somehow become a better platform for that kind of application? I don't see how that follows.