Addressing the jQM concern, this is why we built Ionic (<a href="http://ionicframework.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ionicframework.com/</a>). It's still alpha and we have a ways to go, but the UI is more "native" centric and we have been improving animation performance over the last week, and on new iOS devices it's hard to tell the difference between simple native app and the hybrid one. Hopefully you'll find it a better solution for hybrid apps.
don't be mystified. all of this comes from your lack of knowledge and experience of native development. if it works in a webview then making a 'native' app out of it is not going to be complicated - you make something with a webview and the html or whatever other source data in the package.<p>its not magic, its not even hard, you just happen to not know about how it works... if you are interested this is easy to fix with google and experimentation. :)<p>knowing about android sdk versions is something you would also know if you were an android developer. its everywhere from the first time you install an sdk or ndk - i agree that Google suck at developer tools and docs, absolutely 110%, and this is a good example of that - a lot of their tools I consider 'unshippable' they are so bug riddled and unusable - but thats a tangent.<p>i do wonder though why even use a native app like this? isn't a web app more friendly? you certainly won't get any of the performance benefits of native code without some real heavy lifting on the part of the framework/library/sdk. isn't a landing page asking you to download a native app just annoying? i know its popular but its just a UX fail however I look at it...
I really like the <i>idea</i> of these multi-platform bridges.<p>But in reality the ones that I have seen suffered from being terribly slow. The last app demo that I saw using phonegap had 3-5 second loading bars come up <i>every time</i> a button was pressed. This was on Android so I am not sure if the platform was to blame or not.
<p><pre><code> But there is reports that Apple will not let you through
since jQuery mobile animations perform too poorly, oups.
</code></pre>
If you read the first answer on the page he links to it sounds like the application was missing a lot of optimisation and was overall executed poorly.
"But you should know that the webview used by phonegap is generally one generation older than the current mobile browser provided with the device."<p>Is that right? Is web browser used by WebView a different thing that a default Android browser?
.. or just check <a href="http://www.icenium.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.icenium.com/</a> which has integrated IDE and does all this without the manual hassle of uploading files.
I built Fitwatchr for Fitbit (<a href="http://www.fitwatchr.com/apps.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.fitwatchr.com/apps.html</a>) using PhoneGap Build and absolutely love it. I can develop locally in Chrome, switch between Android/iOS using the DevTools, then deploy using Build. Coupled with Kendo UI Mobile, which auto translates the UI of your app to fit the platform, it took days to get a basic prototype running instead of weeks. Highly recommended!
Totally agree with the author here. Being primarily an Android developer I hate when I need to get access to a Mac to anything iOS related. Phonegap Build solves this problem. I work for avocarrot.com and I managed to do a Phonegap wrapper of our iOS SDK with the build service only using my linux machine.. Pretty awesome!
If you want to use angular and phonegap, I create grunt tasks that you can use with the angular generator for yeoman : <a href="https://github.com/dsimard/grunt-angular-phonegap" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dsimard/grunt-angular-phonegap</a>
Now, this is pie-in-the-sky thinking, but I'd love to see something like Xamarin, that uses JS (for logic) and HTML/subset of CSS (for presentation) that builds cross-platform using native widgets.<p>Hey, one can dream, can't they?