We wrote a post back in April covering our experiences to date using PhoneGap for mobile app development. At the time, we felt it was a cost-effective way to offer our clients the benefits of both a native app and a web app. With several more months of experience under our belts, we’re changing our strategy and recommendations with PhoneGap.
We’ve discovered a number of drawbacks that keep PhoneGap from being the solution we hoped it would be. The major issue we’ve encountered with PhoneGap is responsiveness. Specifically:
- Apps built using PhoneGap are not as responsive as a native app. When a user initiates a touch event, there’s a deliberate pause while the JavaScript code distinguishes between a touch and swipe event. The pause is often significant enough that the user assumes there’s an error.
- The more data you need to display on a screen, the slower the response time. Mobile browsers and their JavaScript engines have trouble quickly processing large amounts of css styling. Because mobile browsers across platforms perform at vastly differing speeds, the developer is required to do a lot of fine-tuning of the code to help the app respond more quickly.
Using PhoneGap instead of native development may be viable in some instances—where the app is primarily focused on maps, if you’re dealing with small sets of data with minimal api processing, and if the app is not dependent on user touch events like games. However, when these criteria don’t apply, PhoneGap is unlikely to save you much in development time and cost.
Based on our experience so far, we’ll be recommending native apps over PhoneGap in most cases moving forward. We’ll continue to keep you posted on our work with mobile app development. In the meantime, we’d love to hear about your experience using PhoneGap or any other mobile development tools.
