Phonegap, Bootstrap Or Jquery Mobile?

I have a web app that's coded in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. My goal with this app is to eventually have it working on all manners of mobile devices, and keep the web app for desktop

Solution 1:

Bootstrap, jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap all solve different problems.

Bootstrap is a responsive web framework. Its goal, like all responsive web frameworks is to adapt your view layer to the device doing the viewing. Giving you different presentations for mobile phones, tablets, PCs, etc.

jQueryMobile is a mobile web application framework that aims to provide a cross-platform mobile application written entirely using JavaScript/HTML/CSS.

PhoneGap is essentially a wrapper (browser) around an existing web application that lets you access native device APIs (like camera, bluetooth, etc.) using JavaScript.

From my own personal experience, which is by no means a comprehensive guide:

Bootstrap

• Pro: Easy to work with, easy to customize.
• Pro: Lots of people use it.
• Con: Lots of people use it, so your application may look like all the rest.

jQuery Mobile

• Pro: A nice mobile-friendly UI.
• Pro: Easy to get started, especially if you're familiar with jQuery.
• Con: The more data injection you need to do, the more complex your app becomes.
• Con: When I last used it, 1.0, it was fairly buggy across devices.

PhoneGap

• Pro: Easily lets you build cross-platform web apps with JavaScript/HTML/CSS and have access to device APIs
• Con: When I last used it, this is mostly for Android, the webview it used was brutally slow.

For trivial applications, my recommendation is to definitely go with cross-platform development. It'll be relatively quick and easy to deploy. Having said that, once you start increasing application complexity, my experience has been to always go native, or at the very least some hybrid solution. Native applications just have a better "feel" at this point in time and more importantly, going native lets you build applications within the design of the platform. Cross-platform is nice, but most Android users don't want their apps to look like iOS apps and vice versa. While it may take longer to build native applications for multiple platforms, I think you ultimately deliver a better experience to your users.

Just my two cents.

Solution 2:

It depends on how many target systems you have and the abundance of resources?

If you're targeting iOS only type devices, I'd say go the native route, or native with UIWebView mixed together. If you however have multiple devices such as iOS/Android/Windows, Blackberry, I'd go with Cordova/PhoneGap. The seamless integration with these systems are nice, and plus you maintain a single codebase.

However when you use the Cordova/PhoneGap route, the native devices functions aren't directly channeled, and there is a lag between various transitions, not to mention overhead with the codebases.

If you have unlimited resources and time constraints, and employee resources, develop native iOS, and native Android, with their WebKit as the primary interface control, and utilize each respective operating system's features available.

I do have to say Cordova, in terms of utlizing Android, and iOS's builtin function has gotten drastically better. They've tapped into the Multimedia Components, the gyroscope, the MAP Kits, Accelerometers, and GPS's of the respective devices to say the list. And as I understand they are continuing to expand. Single code base is nice! But that's if you have tight resources. If you have a big company with numerous programmers with numerous disciplines, go Native 100%.

Solution 3:

It really depends on what you are targeting.

Personally, I like PhoneGap as it provides developers a way to create native iOS and Android apps. But JQuery mobile is also quite impressive. Developers have created impressive products with both these technologies.

Nevertheless, JQuery Mobile creates a webpage which is designed for mobile devices. PhoneGap creates an app (Nearly for six platforms like IOS, Android, BlackBerry, etc.,).