What is PhoneGap?
PhoneGap is an open-source mobile development framework originally created by Nitobi. It allows developers to build applications for mobile devices using web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The key benefit of PhoneGap is that it wraps the web code into native containers, allowing access to device features on platforms like iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
Some key things to know about PhoneGap:
- Open source and free to use
- Owned by Adobe
- Works by packaging web code into native apps
- Allows web code to access native device features via JavaScript APIs
- Supports building for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and more
- Has a large plugin ecosystem to extend functionality
- Apps may not have quite as high performance as pure native
- Simplifies multi-platform app development
PhoneGap helps web developers reuse their existing web development skills to build mobile apps. Instead of learning platform-specific languages like Swift, Java or C#, they can use web standards for faster, easier development. If native functionality is needed, PhoneGap plug-ins bridge the gap.
Android Studio, Qt, Xcode, Website 2 APK Builder, WeSetupYourWebViewApp, WebViewGold, Qt Creator, Ionic Framework, Uno Platform, B4X, Apache Cordova are some alternatives to PhoneGap.