Write your app in HTML5, upload it and get back app-store ready apps

https://build.phonegap.com/

by geoffroy • 15 years ago

330 93 15 years ago

build.phonegap.com

adamjernst• 15 years ago

I think PhoneGap is doing great work, they're obviously getting better, and I don't mean to diminish what others have poured so much effort into.

But, are there any successful apps made with PhoneGap? Writing apps in HTML5 is constantly hyped, but there isn't a single HTML app out of the dozens on my iPhone except Netflix. PhoneGap's app gallery doesn't have a single app I've heard of.

(The Netflix app isn't too pleasant, either, unfortunately.)

domhofmann2• 15 years ago

The new LinkedIn and OkCupid apps are primarily HTML5 based. Not quite the same, but every new release of the Facebook app seems to have more of its existing views replaced by HTML5 counterparts.

flyosity5• 15 years ago

I'm fairly certain that the Facebook iPhone app does not UIWebViews to render anything. Their fast-scrolling tableviews are painstakingly crafted from scratch, natively, and (I believe) still use Joe Hewitt's framework for complex view rendering. I know some guys on the Facebook iPhone app team and they're die-hard Cocoa developers, I can't see them ever saying "screw it" and using a UIWebView with HTML.

rhizome2• 15 years ago

And I uninstalled the OKC app within a week of them making the switch. Changing it to every action being roundtrip-based made it unusably slow. A total misstep, if you ask me.

pstr• 15 years ago

Apple's "App Store" app on iOS uses HTML...

smackfu2• 15 years ago

Certainly seems like it, or at least every page it displays is doing a separate server call that is not cached very well.

Limes1023• 15 years ago

Haha - Indeed. It didn't load the style sheets for me once. Not a pretty sight.

zerostar072• 15 years ago

Mobile browsers are getting better and better, and apple's iOS happens to have the best. I think the app store distribution mechanism is the main reason you don't see many html apps. It's the big entry point, there's a huge network effect and its cool to say "we have an app for that". Maybe facebook's project Spartan will spark the inevitable switch to html. I mean, check out twitter or kindle on the ipad... what are they lacking in?

maccman• 15 years ago

Just wait till Spine Mobile is released on the 4th of October at FOWA:

http://cl.ly/Aa4V http://cl.ly/Aa7P

rapind• 15 years ago

Looks great maccman. Here's a little more context if you're not sure what he means by "Spine Mobile".

http://bit.ly/q7Wrkr

jasonlotito• 15 years ago

> But, are there any successful apps made with PhoneGap?

Define successful. Because, let's be honest, if I need an application for my company that will be used internally, does it matter if you haven't heard about it? Don't get caught look at this from just one point of view.

mikeklaas2• 15 years ago

Our app (Zite for iPad) is 90% HTML5+js and (I think) is reasonably successful.

sv123• 15 years ago

Is it made in phonegap though? ie. The only native control on your app is a web browser window?

alexhaefner• 15 years ago

This has always been my feeling. It hasn't made me any friends though.

Phonegap is a great feel good piece of technology, that browser enthusiasts can point to and say, "See this is what you can do with the web".

zeta• 15 years ago

The FT app is based on html5. Initially, they had an app, but transitioned quickly to html5. Takes a wee bit longer to load, but barely notice that anymore. The experience otherwise is pretty much the same. And for what its worth, it's the best news app on my ipad.

vinhboy• 15 years ago

Is there like a demo app with code I can look at? Thanks.

jberryman2• 15 years ago

$ git clone http://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-start.git

Hisoka• 15 years ago

I may be ignorant, but to write a complex app, don't you need HTML5 AND a mobile javascript framework like JQuery Mobile and Sencha? Or does HTML5 handle that too? If it does require a Javascript framework, that's when the quality deteoriates... I think imitating the look and feel of native apps is easy. Making the performance smooth on the other hand is hard.

flyosity5• 15 years ago

I'd say they're both hard. As an interface designer who works on iOS apps, it always pains me to see a web technology mobile app that's trying to look like it was built with UIKit but it's ever-so-slightly off. Some pixels are broken, text looks wrong, padding is off. I know why it's alluring, but I'd much prefer to see them craft their own interface style without aping Apple's UIKit look and feel.

If someone is trying really hard to emulate a native app's interface but without native technologies, I think they're already doing it wrong. Focus on the UX, not taking a different framework's exact visual style and copying it pixel for pixel.

jbail3• 15 years ago

HTML5 is JavaScript. Without JavaScript, HTML5 is just a few semantic HTML tags (like header and section) and a few extra form input attributes (like required and placeholder).

As far as JavaScript frameworks go, you could use Sencha or jQuery Mobile or one of the other few dozen frameworks out there --- or you could roll your own.

I've been doing mobile web development for about a year now. I've done both PhoneGap and over-the-air mobile web/native apps (with embedded webviews that load HTML/CSS/JS from the web when requested). Both types of apps accepted by Apple and in the Appstore as well as in the Android Market. I would recommend rolling your own and not trying to imitate the look of native apps. One of the strengths of using HTML5 is that you can create a custom look and feel that doesn't look like every other app out there.

Since you mentioned Sencha and jQuery Mobile, here's what I think having used both:

Using Sencha is nothing at all like using HTML5. You don't even write HTML or CSS. You write JavaScript that uses Sencha's classes/methods. The look and feel very much tries to mimic native and they do a pretty good job at it...except that most widgets look like they were ripped from an iPhone, which is disorienting for users on Android. That said, you get good performance and a boatload of widgets/ui controls out of the box. The price for this is a large, multi-hundred kb framework and a commercial license.

jQuery Mobile doesn't really try to look native and it really doesn't "feel" native either. jQuery has it's own ui controls that more or less look identical on iPhone or Android. With jQuery Mobile, you do write HTML and have a more transparent view of that as well as of the CSS. But, you have to write HTML the "jQuery Mobile way" to utilize the UI built into the framework. You don't get as many widgets and ui-controls as you do in Sencha and overall, the look and feel is not of the same caliber either. But, it's smaller than Sencha, has your standard MIT license and is more easily modified.

Neither is perfect and both have pluses and minuses. If you know some HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you will absolutely get better performance and and a smoother look and feel by rolling your own light JavaScript for your app that does just what it needs to do.

If you'd like to see an example app I built using PhoneGap and handrolled HTML/JavaScript/CSS, you can download Easy Baby from the Android Market. It's free. You'll find a link to it on my website: http://newbabysleep.com

FooBarWidget• 15 years ago

I can't see why anybody would actually use jQuery Mobile and Sencha for web app development. I've tried them last week and they were impressive on a desktop browser. On a mobile device, not so much. Both jQuery Mobile and Sencha feel slow, very slow. The animations are choppy. Response times on clicks are way too long. Everything flickers like mad. Focus borders are drawn at all the wrong places. I can actually feel that it's a web app trying too hard to be a native app. On my Android phone it's even slower than on my iPad 1.

I'm not blaming jQuery Mobile or Sencha. I think mobile browsers are just not ready for delivering a smooth UI experience that's up to par with native apps.

yakto• 15 years ago

> The price for this is a large, multi-hundred kb framework and a commercial license.

Sencha Touch is free now (not sure when that happened). And the multi-hundred kb framework isn't much of an issue since it's bundled up in the native download and always local to the device.

Urgo• 15 years ago

https://build.phonegap.com/docs/ios-builds

"Since PhoneGap Build uses Apple's standard development process to build applications, you will need to sign up for their developer program to build iOS applications on PhoneGap Build. You will also need a Mac to configure your certificate and provisioning profile."

joelhaasnoot• 15 years ago

It's "just" a code generation tool

dkersten• 15 years ago

Check out AppMobi[1], it may be what you need - at least, from my brief glance at it, it looks like it: build iOS and android apps using HTML+JS, no need for a Mac or the iOS developer kit. The core tools are free too, but they charge for services such as compiling your program for iOS and such. They also have something called DirectCanvas which is basically HTML5 canvas without the rest of the browser cruft, for higher performance canvas apps (eg, games - they have built in support for the Impact JS game engine, for example).

[1] http://www.appmobi.com/

infocaptor• 15 years ago

How much effort needed to convert my single html with few javascript files to be app-store eligible. I think there is more to just using the phonegap http://www.mockuptiger.com/a/123wireframe.php

jakejake• 15 years ago

cool web app. i think the difficult part of converting it for mobile would be the screen size necessary to work effectively and possibly getting the touch gestures to work properly for moving and resizing the controls.

nithinag• 15 years ago

this looks cool!

exratione• 15 years ago

Speaking as someone writing a fairly major HTML5 iOS app using Jo and PhoneGap: this looks like a very helpful way to take the make-work out of the case where you have an app that uses no native functionality, and is not in any way optimized for best appearance.

That's not a knock - a lot of people have that use case, and spend a lot of time on their own systems for deploying to multiple platforms. Consider internal apps, for example, that don't have to be massively visually slick and polished.

But ... given the very large differences between even similar platforms, and even between versions of platforms, you're not going to be getting much from this if you are building ultra-slick apps in which you really do need consider, say, how hardware acceleration or browser quirks fit into the picture.

zerostar072• 15 years ago

Wasn't there a time when apple rejected phonegap apps? (they did reject one of mine for sure).

anothermachine2• 15 years ago

Yes. Policy changed in 2009.

https://code.google.com/p/phonegap/downloads/list

anothermachine2• 15 years ago

Nice, and I use PhoneGap for Android, but you lose all the niceties like access to hardware buttons (which means you convert limited screen space to menus) and keyboard and intents and whatnot.

I had to write some plugins to get my game working on Android (and there are still compatibility problems around opening intents), so PhoneGap apps definitely lose something in the usability department.

And of course animations are not successful in this environment.

Ads are a pain too, if that's important to you, with the Google Admob/Adwords migration happening and the mobile web vs app ambiguity.

PhoneGap seems helpful as a part of the app's main UI, but native chrome is still important to completing an app's functionality and usability. I don't see how Build solves that use case.

Still, it's a niche.

sunsu• 15 years ago

The menu button, back button, and search button all work with Phonegap. What version are you using?

http://docs.phonegap.com/phonegap_events_events.md.html

forkrulassail• 15 years ago

Beta code pretty please?

ggoodale2• 15 years ago

Great service - I've used it to build a modest application or two for Android and iOS. One caveat: Phonegap plugins that include native components (for example, the Facebook plugin) can't be included in apps built with Phonegap Build (yet).

drzaiusapelord• 15 years ago

What plugins have you been using? Last time I look at pg, the plugins I found were alpha quality or just abandoned. I'd love to hear what's current. Thanks.

ggoodale2• 15 years ago

At the moment, just the Facebook plugin for Facebook Connect authentication.

gto16108• 15 years ago

Phone Gap paired with sencha would make one seriously native-feeling iPhone application. And all HTML5? Beautiful.

wavephorm• 15 years ago

Upload your website, download a native app.

What is wrong with this picture? If you can build your app as a web app and don't require hardware access then I'd think twice whether a native app is required.

adolph• 15 years ago

"Native app" could be a critical bit for marketing or payment processing.

pxlpshr• 15 years ago

Required? No. But there are benefits to being available on said platforms such as free distribution and eye balls.

But there are also drawbacks, more specifically with Apple, if you have to spend a lot of time in the black hole review process.

dpcan• 15 years ago

It's about being found in the app stores. That's where people look for stuff on their phones, that's where you need to come up if you have something you want on someone's phone.

Of course there is a lot of down-side to this, but it is what it is. I wish the App Stores, particularly the Android Market, would create a much more elaborate system of categories allowing people to narrow their browsing down to exactly what they want, then it wouldn't matter so much if there was a lot of useless crap in the app stores, because we would never see it.

rhizome2• 15 years ago

This brings up an interesting point: is there anecdata regarding appstore presence being a gateway/entry-point for a website? That is, first the app, then the website?

teej• 15 years ago

HTML+CSS+JS certainly implies a website, but it doesnt have to be.

We built a prototype mobile game in two weeks using PhoneGap and we were able to deploy to Android effortlessly. The visibility of the app store gave us (zero marketing, free app) brought in 2k downloads in two days.

That kind of free distribution is hard to replicate on the open web.

jeffreymcmanus• 15 years ago

There are plenty of good reasons to write apps this way, not the least of which being access to the app store. (Unless you've figured out a way to charge $1.99 for access to a mobile web site, in which case, God bless.)

bmelton• 15 years ago

There used to be an HTML app store. I can't find it now, as I don't remember the name, but that existed.

It's also pretty easy to just implement a registration fee, especially now with Stripe out in the wild.

If you're really looking to limit access though, you could probably use something like gumroad to get it off the ground.

Lucent• 15 years ago

That's what I've been saying for years, until I was dragged into the Apple store by a friend and, to kill time, tried my web app on an iPad. It worked pretty well. An intrigued 10-year-old or so girl across the aisle asked, "What app is that?" "It's not an app but a site and you can see it at [redacted].com." She was turned off by the time I said "site" and tuned me out.

After that incident, I resolved to take my web app to the various app stores and am working on that with PhoneGap now.

jberryman2• 15 years ago

PhoneGap gives you access to much of the phone's hardware in a cross-platform compatible way:

http://docs.phonegap.com/

smackfu2• 15 years ago

Well, one advantage of the app store is that you can charge for your app.

ricardobeat• 15 years ago

Am I back to 2010? Or am I reading Reddit?

Rotor• 15 years ago

Very curious to see how they implement this tool.

I would think there would have to be some type of "compiler hints" for particular app device builds.

czzarr• 15 years ago

how different is this from strobe ?

dannyr• 15 years ago

You still need PhoneGap to build an iOS/Android app.

toblender• 15 years ago

Funny I just released an application using this method yesterday. Too bad the Apple sales reporting site is down. I wanted to see how well HTML5 Apps sell.

http://defyent.com/#astro-dating

designium• 15 years ago

QUESTION: Is there a good tutorial about creating PhoneGap apps integrated to Rails apps?

pmdan• 15 years ago

This is my favorite example of an expertly-made PhoneGap app: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pCtD4GuAqE

So smooth.

MatthewPhillips• 15 years ago

Nice. Anyone know how they achieved the transition effect? It's not a simple CSS3 transform. The bottom of the page seems to move first, then the top of the page is dragged over.

doctoboggan• 15 years ago

It could be an artifact of the scanning used in the video capture. The image has moved between the time the top pixels and bottom pixels were recorded. I believe this is known as aliasing.

Limes1023• 15 years ago

I'm writing really a very large app for the company I work for. We're using PhoneGap with HTML and JavaScript and have many plugins.

What we are not having problems with is the fact that we only really have a single thread to do everything. All I can say is that I'm glad it wasn't my idea to build it this way.

nupark22• 15 years ago

This is a surprisingly often ignored limitation of the browsers. You need threads to achieve decent performance given any significant complexity, and mobile CPUs are going multi-core.

Limes1023• 15 years ago

Yep - Buttons are bad enough, but things like sliders are just the worst things imaginable!!

I thought it might be worth looking into web workers, but everything seems to interact with the DOM so that's not much help either.

ashrust• 15 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something but given you write the app in HTML/JS it must be difficult to unit test your wrappers for the phonegap functions, as I assume you can't simply pull up your dev site from the phone's browser. I'm thinking particularly about things like the contacts or network status functions.

dendory• 15 years ago

This site is awesome. To try it out, I made a quick one page app, uploaded it, made signing keys, and got it to the Android Marketplace, all inside of a few hours. My first mobile app ever.

pbreit• 15 years ago

I started looking at PhoneGap but wasn't happy with Jquery Mobile for the UI. I am now trying out Titanium which offers a similar promise of ease for web/Javascript developers but with more native UI elements. So far so good but developing in Aptana/Eclipse-based Titanium Studio is a drag.

The more "consumer" your app the more likely it needs to be mobile. But I think there is probably a large class of apps where PhoneGap/Titanium make sense. Definitely in the internal business category where the audience is finite and the look-and-feel is secondary to the functionality and cost/ease of development and maintenance.

diamondhead• 15 years ago

Is there any way to get an iOS development license using no Apple device?

unfed• 15 years ago

nope

Write your app in HTML5, upload it and get back app-store ready apps

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