About Phonegap limitations

[Juan P. Verni]

Hello,

My name is Juan Verni and I, together with two partners have created the ProMOOD app (live in the app-store) using the Phonegap platform. I understand that this is more of a general question, but We are going desperate in the search for answers, so I will try here, maybe someone can redirect us to a better place. We created the idea, flow, design and content and payed a company to develop the app, they chose Phonegap for its multi-platform benefits, but we had troubles since the beginning.  After the company finished the app we released it but we had lots of problems, the biggest one being stability and random crashes. So we looked for another expert, he worked on the app and still couldn't find why it performs well in some devices and crashes in some others, even the same specs but different device. After him, we hired another one, and he still couldn't figure out what happens. It's getting to the point where we can no longer sell a product that won't perform well, get bad ratings and complaints. So we just want to know the limitations of the platform, whether we should be spending money on it, or we should just remake it in X-code. Could you recommend any expert that we could rely for this answer? We just don't know where else to ask. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Best,
Juan

[Kerri Shotts]

Unfortunately, without being able to look at the source code and without seeing actual crash reports and the like, there's very little assistance we can offer.

You can look at http://people.phonegap.com and find devs close to you, or you can post on Cordova's #jobs channel on Slack (http://cordova.slack.com). 

PhoneGap itself is generally quite stable, especially on iOS, so I'm laying odds that it is the code in your app that is doing something bad. Ideally you'd hook it up to a debugger and see if you're having memory leaks or logging other errors to the console, which would help point out any potential problems. Furthermore, you'd ideally have crash reports from many different beta testers who have encountered the stability problems, all of which would go a long ways to actually discovering the problem. 

Keep in mind that writing something in native code is no guarantee of success -- native apps can crash too.

[Jesse Monroy]

Can you provide a link to your App?

TIA
Jesse

[jcesarmobile]

I recommend using crashlytics on your app (or any similar software), it will give more details about the crashes, and the devices where it crashed

I use it on native apps and phonegap apps and all of them crash, especially on android (too much android versions and device vendors)

[Juan P. Verni]

Thanks a lot for your answer. I understand that without looking at the code it's hard to know what's going on, that's why it was more of a general question just to know whether we should spend more time with the technology. This quote gives me some peace "PhoneGap itself is generally quite stable, especially on iOS", actually that's what we wanted to know, so now it's a matter of finding the right developer.

Thanks again for the links and the advice, really appreciated.
Cheers,
Juan

[Juan P. Verni]

Hello Jesse, sure, here you go:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/promood-mood-tracker-mind/id969168596?mt=8

Thanks,
Juan

El lunes, 26 de octubre de 2015, 22:57:57 (UTC+1), Jesse Monroy escribió:

[Juan P. Verni]

Thanks for the advice! I will look it up, maybe it gives some clues on what's going on, although I would have expected that the developers we hired did this job already.

Have a good one,
Juan

[jcesarmobile]

Well, if you told the developers to add a way of tracking errors and crashes, then you can expect the developer did that, if you didn't ask for it they won't do it. You can't expect they do more than you asked for.

[Jesse Monroy]

@Juan,
I was unable to download a copy of your app because it is $4.99. So I have no way to evaluate the program.

In review of what is available, I don't hold out much for the app. The screens provide appear to be more of a sales pitch than a "showing of features". For the text, it is unclear how the app works. There are alot of promises, but not much else.

On the website, it appears this was mistake also. Too much time, effort and use of flashy animations distract from whatever the intent of the website was.

I would start over. This product appears to be a major (but subtle) series of mistakes.

Best of Luck,
Jesse

[Kerri Shotts]

Linking to a paid app isn't apt to help -- but you could generate some codes that would let a few of us download it for free and play with it/look at the internal code. Otherwise, there's not much more we can do to help.