Re:Ask HN: mobile development with Phonegap vs. native?
by westernpixel on Wednesday November 13, 2013 @02:58PM
(#6728014)
We had to make the same choice a couple months ago with my startup. After some feedback from native & phonegap developers and building a quick prototype with Phonegap we went with native.
Basically Phonegap is cool if you want something for both platforms pretty fast and the UI is not too complex (works well for showroom apps for example). However, performance might be an issue (especially since iOS throttles Webkit outsides of safari), and I've heard that you'd more or less need to use pure JS since existing frameworks (e.g. Sencha) would be too slow. Last thing is that you'd generally still need to write 5-15% of native code for your app, depending on its complexity (again, haven't been far enough but got it from devs who use Phonegap for most of their apps).
Basically Phonegap is cool if you want something for both platforms pretty fast and the UI is not too complex (works well for showroom apps for example). However, performance might be an issue (especially since iOS throttles Webkit outsides of safari), and I've heard that you'd more or less need to use pure JS since existing frameworks (e.g. Sencha) would be too slow. Last thing is that you'd generally still need to write 5-15% of native code for your app, depending on its complexity (again, haven't been far enough but got it from devs who use Phonegap for most of their apps).