> Sorry, are you saying that it's the effort for you to build a native Android app, a native iOS app, a native Windows Phone app, and a mobile web app combined add up to more than the effort it takes to make a single web app and get it to run well on Phonegap on multiple platforms?
Actually, depending on the level of quality you need, yes.
A very basic form based app can be better served by a phone gap app, and be of better general quality.
But the case where you won't be helped by a cross platform solution are numerous. It is obvious if you heavily need performance or rely on a lot of native API where you want very fine grained control (you might even not want feature parity between platforms, if some platform give better tools than an others), or use native third party libraries.
But even in cases where you require near pixel perfect layouts for a wide range of devices, or have unusual set of rules to position or move your elements, handle device rotation in non standard ways. In these cases you might be better off doing native apps as many times as you need to.
It seems extremely wasteful, but dealing with hacks on top of hacks in a single HTML+CSS+js codebase relying on an extra abstraction layer enclosing wildly different platforms is a hell in itself.
Actually, depending on the level of quality you need, yes. A very basic form based app can be better served by a phone gap app, and be of better general quality.
But the case where you won't be helped by a cross platform solution are numerous. It is obvious if you heavily need performance or rely on a lot of native API where you want very fine grained control (you might even not want feature parity between platforms, if some platform give better tools than an others), or use native third party libraries.
But even in cases where you require near pixel perfect layouts for a wide range of devices, or have unusual set of rules to position or move your elements, handle device rotation in non standard ways. In these cases you might be better off doing native apps as many times as you need to. It seems extremely wasteful, but dealing with hacks on top of hacks in a single HTML+CSS+js codebase relying on an extra abstraction layer enclosing wildly different platforms is a hell in itself.
edit: spelling