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by tolmasky 5524 days ago
"That fragmentation is driving developers to embrace frameworks such as PhoneGap, which WebOS has wholeheartedly adopted. "

Honest question: really? Is anyone actually using this stuff in a serious way? I ask because I use only iOS basically so I may genuinely be missing this revolution that is taking place, but at least on iOS I have never downloaded an app that was phonegap, nor do I think any significant charting apps use it. Is it widely used for custom built apps or something? Or used a lot in android? Or is it actually not being used a lot?

1 comments

I've seen quite a few apps written in phone gap work really well on iOS devices. I think many people are surprised how well an apps experience can be with this tech... granted, lots of people don't know that large numbers of apps are really just a web view wired to a minimal obj-c shell so I think the approach is pretty successful if not the framework itself.
A counter-example is Safari To Go - Safari Book Online's iPad app, which they withdrew due to bad review: http://blog.safaribooksonline.com/2010/11/24/ipad-app-safari...

Most people agreed that PhoneGap was the wrong framework. It's not that PhoneGap is intrinsically bad - it is not - but that it is not for every task, and more likely, it is not good for most tasks that are more than a short load-lookup-leave cycle.