Question

I am planning to develop an mobile app (my first one) for multiple operation systems (including Android, IOS, WindowsPhone) – in the wild internet I found a framework called phonegap, as a possibility solution to minimize the development process.
I understand the advantages phonegap has – but could not find real downsides…
1.) So the question is why should I not use phonegap?

2.) Is phonegap only slower, because it is wrapped inside the OS, if yes how much slower? I mean can you really tell the differentce between a native app and phonegap, or is only slower when you need hardware acceleration e.g. for gaming?

A few more informations about the project. Currently I have several ‘.Net’ services and provider, communicating via WCF. The App should be able to receive and send video streams and audio data from and to a service, such as a provider would do.

3.) Is it possible to use phonegap for that, or shall I stick to native apps?

Answer 1

All cross-platform frameworks (including HTML) generally share the same advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

• Write code once that works the same on every target platform.

Disadvantages:

• The way it works is often not that wonderful.
• Generally lower performance than native implementations.
• Some also have their own widget set that looks out of place.
• Due to individual platform quirks, you still have to test everywhere.
• You get lowest-common-denominator access to features. When a native feature is supported, often you can only access it in one way: the portable framework’s way. This is sometimes at odds with the target platform’s preferred way.
• In the event that you may access features unique to a target platform, you lose run-everywhere portability.
• Every so-called “cross-platform” framework is a platform in its own right. See earlier point about quirks: Now, instead of having to know N platforms, you have to know N+1.

For best results targeting multiple platforms, I recommend the following:

Design your core logic (the part that doesn’t use any UI) cleanly, with a well-defined API. Make it general enough to be fairly easily ported between environments. (Is SQLite really that different in Objective C vs. Java?)

Design your UI following the best practices of your target platforms so that it looks great (and fits in) on each one. (For Android, see http://developer.android.com/design) Have the UI interact with the core logic via the API you created.