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Saying Goodbye to PhoneGap

Max Lynch on August 11, 2020

Adobe just announced that they are shuttering PhoneGap, PhoneGap Build, and their (long non-existent) investment in Apache Cordova. As the pioneer...
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Alan Montgomery

Brilliant write up Max. Ionic has changed our company in terms of being able to quickly offer mobile app solutions of our huge back end systems to our customers to take their work out on the field.

So thank you, and an extended thank you to Adobe for the above. 🙏🔥

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Adnan Ahmed

Remembering my time for trying PhoneGap to implement my web dev skills to mobile. Ultimately switching to Ionic and Cordova.

Good bye PhoneGap and thanks for being the first drop of rain in hybrid mobile development.

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Michael Gangolf

👋 good bye Phonegap! Did a lot for the community. It even was the framework that brought me into developing apps with Appcelerator Titanium 😁 At the time when I was evaluating mobile app frameworks I've ended up with Phonegap and Titanum left. The setup, documentation, usability and stability of Ti made the win at the end. So thanks for that 😝👍 I've never regret it!

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Aaron Gong

Ionic Vue hopefully once Vue 3 gets released things will move fast

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Abe Dolinger

As somebody who knows little about Ionic, I have to say I was kind of turned off by this piece, as it reads to me like an ad for a framework, a brief trashing of other frameworks, and a little at the beginning and end about the title. I don't think a good framework has to use articles like this to promote themselves.

Not to say that Ionic is not a good framework - obviously it has a strong following. Just that this strategy of self-promotion leaves a bad taste.

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Max Lynch

Not trying to bash. Rather, pointing out the ways the “hybrid” approach still remains important and differentiated. Many people do not realize the differences in how various cross platform projects work. Given how much FUD we get in our direction I feel the need to balance the record from time to time!

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Sebastien Lorber

Honestly after being a backend dev, then a web dev, then a cordova+reactjs dev, then a ReactNative dev, I don't see how ReactJS would win the mobile battle.

ReactNative looks to me way better than ReactJS + Cordova/PWA for mobile, and it's not so complicated to learn for a ReactJS dev. You can actually use your existing web codebase in RN.

Also the less complete css features of RN looks to me a feature not a bug. The cascade is what breaks the Css encapsulation, and being forced to Css in JS has never been a problem.

And we can use ReactNative on the web, like Twitter does, with extraordinary css scalability thanks to atomic css-in-js...
sebastienlorber.com/atomic-css-in-js

I don't see why go back to web tech when upgrading to native is so easy today. And for desktop it's the same, do we really want to use Electron when new RN platforms are coming???

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Vince Ramces Oliveros

Flutter requires web devs to throw out their JavaScript investment and their web support is not viable for Progressive Web Apps.

I think it enhances their productivity without sacrificing their knowledge in JavaScript, I think most dev switch to flutter suffers from the web dev environment(tooling is not efficient, spend less time in configuration and start coding). Also, flutter supports PWA.

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Max Lynch • Edited

Flutter might support PWA, but it's not PWA ready. The amount of JS required for Flutter Web is astronomical as they have to implement browser primitives like text selection and copy/paste from scratch. Their own official gallery demo ships a 4MB JS file! I don't consider that a viable option for PWAs which, according to Chrome and web perf leaders, should be in the single digit KB or low double digits and with much better lighthouse scores. Contrast that with the innovation happening in the rest of the PWA ecosystem resulting in tiny bundles and incredibly high performance web apps and PWAs.

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Vince Ramces Oliveros

I think the gallery demo ships with static assets(and not lazily loaded through CDN) that's why it ships 4MB and webp image is not supported. Flutter for web is not entirely ready for production, like SEO for example. Text selection is supported from another widget(SelectableText()). I still think PWA is still pre-mature.

Overall. I generally don't use flutter for web in production. But I really like its support from other online editor(codepen for example)

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Jash Sayani

Wow! Sad to see PhoneGap being discontinued. I remember using it and contributing to it back in 2012, and all the Cordova meet-ups I went to in San Francisco.

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Edwin Witlox

PhoneGap is actually a bit of nostalgy for me. I started developing hybrid app with PG. So i say goodbey with mixed feelings

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larrykoch680

yeah i am also very happy for expertwatchman.com/

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Carlos Magno

Farewell, my friend.

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Rabbit

Thanks a lot PhoneGap.
Goodbye!

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Rubén Afonso

Great post! Thank you to you and thank you to Adobe. I have a question for you (to Ionic), what will happen with PhoneGap push plugin? I think that is one of the most used plugins available in Ionic