As someone who has only dabbled with Obj. C but has 10+ years of traditional web dev experience this looks v. attractive. What am I losing by not learning Obj.C/xcode to build native iOS apps?
When the iPhone SDK was released, I got serious about learning Objective-C and Xcode. It was a slow painful process, but now I strongly prefer writing native apps to doing front end web development. The Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks are really great, and Objective-C has really been improving as a language. Xcode... yea it still sucks but things like provisioning profiles have gotten far more manageable since the early days.
What you are missing out by not building native apps is an environment that is designed to really help you create great apps for users. Even with the crazy rate web technologies have been developing, a lot of it still feels like a bunch of hacks compared to native app development, which feels much more natural to me.
The other side to that argument is what can't be done in native. From what I understand, you can't do a/b testing, you aren't going to be able to iterate as quickly, push bug fixes out instantly, etc. etc .
Andrew Cross did a write-up about it (http://www.andrewcross.ca/2012/03/16/quick-tips-from-sxsw-fo...) the gist being that many companies started out using something like trigger.io/phonegap/others so that they could benefit from the quick iteration cycles and other benefits of web. Once the things settle down a bit, they built native apps.
Sure. I thought GP was asking about what you get writing purely webapp stuff.
Phonegap/Titanium are great, but they're hacks. Phonegap is just running your app in an uiWebView, then exposing some of the camera/etc. stuff via its own API, yeah?
That's great, but IMHO, it shouldn't have to be like that.
How is that any different then what Apple originally intended, and still makes available for web apps? PhoneGap is just exposing more native features than Apple does?
What you are missing out by not building native apps is an environment that is designed to really help you create great apps for users. Even with the crazy rate web technologies have been developing, a lot of it still feels like a bunch of hacks compared to native app development, which feels much more natural to me.