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Avoid Cross-Platform Mobile Frameworks

Posted Jul 22, 2012 0:29 UTC (Sun) by ldo (subscriber, #40946)
Parent article: PhoneGap 2.0 released

The consensus seems to be that trying to use cross-platform frameworks to develop common apps for, say, both IOS and Android leads to a mediocre user experience on both platforms. Users on each platform have become accustomed to platform-specific ways of doing things, and it behooves you as a developer to cater to that.

Sure, using this stuff lowers your costs, but it also lowers your quality. And if you can’t afford to offer a quality product, why should the users be interested?

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Posted Jul 22, 2012 1:56 UTC (Sun) by robla (subscriber, #424) [Link]

Which consensus? I think it pretty much depends on the app you're creating and which framework you're using.

The Wikimedia Foundation (where I work) is using PhoneGap for building the official Wikipedia app for Android, iOS, Blackberry Playbook, and Windows 8.

The nice thing about PhoneGap (from what I understand) is that you build the core of your UI in HTML, and then it's simple enough to replace portions of the app with native portions where necessary. Using PhoneGap, we're able to share a lot of work not only between the apps, but also with the mobile version of the website.

Since many platforms have HTML as a core component of their UI (e.g. WebOS, Boot2Gecko, Metro, Playbook, Chrome), and there's so much work going on to optimize HTML on all platforms, and no matter what, you almost certainly need to at least have a mobile web interface in addition to your app if you have any significant web presence, it's not dumb at all to invest the bulk of your work on HTML.

For some applications, it makes sense to invest heavily in native iOS and Android development. However, there are plenty of cases where it doesn't make sense at all.

Avoid Cross-Platform Mobile Frameworks

Posted Jul 24, 2012 16:57 UTC (Tue) by Again (guest, #71356) [Link]

Two good articles to read that argue against "write once run anywhere" style of mobile development are here:
http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2012/03/multi-platform-f...

and a follow-up here:
http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2012/04/multi-platform-f...

Avoid Cross-Platform Mobile Frameworks

Posted Jul 26, 2012 6:45 UTC (Thu) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link]

It's a bit of a rant, so I'll just pick a few arguments I don't agree with. It isn't native: html/js apps are a supported way to build apps for most platforms. It crashes: I doubt it, for html apps. It's the least common denominator: you're just responding to robla, who pointed out “it's simple enough to replace portions of the app with native portions where necessary”.