RE: {Mobile Portland} What is the current state of cross-platform app development

[Kelly White]

You should also take a hard look at Xamarin – http://xamarin.com/

 

-kw

 

From: mobile-...@googlegroups.com [mailto:mobile-...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Sean McCleary
Sent: Sunday, June 9, 2013 1:07 PM
To: mobile-...@googlegroups.com
Subject: {Mobile Portland} What is the current state of cross-platform app development

 

A little over a year ago, I was looking at different cross-platform mobile technologies. It seemed that the front-runners were Appcelerator's Titanium and PhoneGap. I loved the concept of PhoneGap since I come from a web development background, but its performance on Android 3.2 was not acceptable. Titanium offers native performance, but I always wondered what the gotcha's would be with Titanium.

Now I am trying to get back into cross-platform mobile development, and I wanted to get some impressions and advice that the good folks of Mobile Portland may have for cross-platform mobile development. I really am only interested in targeting iOS and Android. I have strong experience with ruby programming so I would also be interested in advice people may have using Ruby Motion or Ruboto, even though these technologies are not cross-platform. Can HTML5 run fast enough on today's phones to provide a good user experience? Is Titanium still one of the best options for cross-platform mobile development. I'm sure I could drum up a bunch more questions, but all I'm really looking for is general advice you may have for cross-platform mobile development.

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[Elia Freedman]

And I have heard very good things about Sencha recently.

Elia

[Elia Freedman]

I don't. I only heard from someone else that it had come a long way.

Elia

On Jun 10, 2013, at 11:20 PM, Sean McCleary <sea...@gmail.com> wrote:

Elia, I'll take another look at Sencha. Some of the things I remember not liking about Sencha a year ago was that it seemed too iOS specific and many Sencha apps felt very awkward on Android. I just took another look at Sencha, and tried out most of their featured app demos. All of the Sencha demos performed poorly on my Nexus 4. I have not seen a demo of a decently performing Sencha application on Android. The only Sencha app that I have seen that works well, by what I have seen on Android, is their Fastbook app http://fb.html5isready.com/ If you know of more example apps, I'd love to see them. I don't know why their Fastbook app performs so much better than all of the other examples I have seen on the Sencha site.

Thank you for the recommendation.

[Jason Grigsby]

Going back to the original email, Sean wrote:

[...]

> A little over a year ago, I was looking at different cross-platform mobile technologies. It seemed that the front-runners were Appcelerator's Titanium and PhoneGap. I loved the concept of PhoneGap since I come from a web development background, but its performance on Android 3.2 was not acceptable.

[...]

> Can HTML5 run fast enough on today's phones to provide a good user experience?

The answer to these questions isn't a framework. The answer is It Depends™. It depends on what you're trying to do.

For quite some time, you've been unable to download an app without using an embedded webview as the iOS App Store is all web views:
http://blog.cloudfour.com/the-ios-app-store-runs-on-web-os/

Apple's original initiatives related to web technology started because they needs to embed web views in iTunes way back in the day. My point is that embedded web views are all over the place in apps. Some do it well, some suck.

A couple of additional thoughts:

* I'm surprised PhoneGap performance on Android 3.2 was a problem. I'm surprised because our experience has been that it is less of an operating system issue and more of a hardware capabilities issue. And I'm surprised because Android 3.2 was a lemon regardless. It was only on tablets and has 0.1% of the market now. I don't doubt you ran into legit issues. Just surprised. :-)
* If you want to see a well implemented PhoneGap app, take a look at TripCase http://www.tripcase.com/ and test it on devices you care about.

-Jason

[marissa anderson]

I think PhoneGap, Titanium, Sencha and jQuery Mobile are all useful tools for creating a decent user experience for web apps on mobile devices. I tend to fit most of my own small web projects in the jQuery Mobile box, since I'm familiar with jQuery's vocabulary and can get things done quickly, but I think there are merits in each of the frameworks for those who want to commit to learning them.

I just took a look at TripCase on my Galaxy S3. The user experience and screen rendering appear better in the web app (using Android Chrome) than the native app. Facebook OAuth was smooth in the web app since I had already entered my FB credentials in Chrome, but in the native app, a PhoneGap webview (including forward/back buttons and editable URL field) prompted for my FB credentials. Selecting the contents of the URL field made a weird Holo check button pop up and obscure the field, and the background (behind the webview) started to blink with some interesting graphical artifacts. Entering my FB credentials within the webview also caused blinking artifacts in the background. Once logged in, navigating around within the web app seemed fast and responsive, but in the native app, switching between screens took a second or two with the spinner while each screen re-rendered.

Maybe my bubble of knowledge is skewed in a particular direction since I do Android native development too, but here's something I have heard more than once: "We developed our app using [framework], but our developer... disappeared... and now we can't find anyone to work on it." It's not reasonable to build a framework app with the expectation that it generates an iOS native app and an Android native app and a responsive mobile HTML5/JS web app, which you can then develop and improve independently using the native features of each platform. I think a lot of companies misunderstand this when they ask for "apps" and receive a cross-platform framework app that performs fairly well on most devices, but lacks certain abilities because of the limitations of webviews.

[Brent]

Hey Sean -

Here's my .02 cents.

1.  I completely agree with Jason's "It Depends" statement.  That really says it all.

2.  There is a PhoneGap Day this July in PDX : http://pgday.phonegap.com/us2013/

3.  I just finished a PG app for a limited private distribution, but had a friend who's company wanted to use PG to build their app.  I slapped my thoughts together for him and have attached it as pdf in case it helps you or anyone else.

Good luck.  Hope that helps.

~ brent

[Sean McCleary]

Thank you all for the excellent feedback. After getting feedback here and doing a good deal of research, I started getting split in three directions.

1. Native Android development and then porting my app to iOS later.
2. Appcellerator's Titanium

3. Phone Gap

I work at a company that develops native apps. I have seen how much time and effort are put into our native Android and iOS apps. Going native is not a fast path, and I do not know Java and Objective-C. I have no doubt that I could learn those languages quickly, but I just know that it would take the longest amount of time for me to produce an Android or iOS app with the standard toolkits.

I am trying to build a prototype application so I am planning on throwing away portions that do not work and I need to be agile. I am also a one-man shop at the moment so I am most likely going to go with Phone Gap for my solution.

I was reading some thoughts about what makes a great app and it was suggested that many great mobile apps do not necessarily take on the look of their host OS. There are many mobile web solutions that try to imitate smart phone OS conventions and fail to deliver because they are perceived as being a knock-off of the original.

I am going to take some time to find out what the limitations of mobile webview rendering is by checking out how Android and iOS work with CSS3 and 3D transforms before committing to Phone Gap. I have a feeling that there can be really excellent mobile apps leveraging web technology, like Sencha's fastbook app. Also new javascript frameworks, like Ember.js, should allow for a web app to act more like an app than a collection of web pages.

I'll do some exploration into Phone Gap and report back in a while with what I find.

Again, thank you for the discussion.

- Sean McCleary

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[Jignesh Desai]

Hi Sean,

 

Any valuable information on your exploration so far ?  Awaiting to hear from you.

 

Regards