Setup:

    npm install -g cordova
    cordova create HelloWorld
    cordova platform add [ios|android|wp8|..]
    

Running:

    cordova serve # browser
    cordova emulate [ios|android|wp8|..] # emulation

This has always been pretty straightforward to me, it's a bit of an extra pain to debug iOS development on a non-OSX machine, but that's true of the parent link, too.

What's been a complete mess to deal with for you? And how long ago did you last use Cordova?

We tried to do that with our Cordova project and it wasn't this straightforward at all - we weren't even accessing the hardware. Some main points are behaviors when opening URLs, a completely unresponsive canvas, and slow rendering on the canvas.

Looking at the doc page I have no real clue I would get to what you did.

http://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/5.0.0/

Granted when I looked at the docs it was a while ago and much worse, but still it wants to teach you everything before letting you see something.

I would start at the home page, instead.

  1. http://cordova.apache.org/
  2. Click 'Download'
  3. Click the link in "[For the] npm version see the Command-Line Interface section [..]"

There's the same set of instructions listed in my comment above.

http://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/5.0.0//guide_cli_index.md....