Benefits of Using PhoneGap for Mobile Application Development

What is PhoneGap and Why Should You Care?

PhoneGap, also known as Apache Cordova, is a technology that lets programmers build a mobile application and then wrap it in the PhoneGap framework that can be installed as a native mobile application across multiple mobile device platforms easily. PhoneGap has significance for both business owners looking to develop a mobile application for their business and programmers looking into developing cross platform mobile applications quickly and with less effort.

Benefits of PhoneGap for Business

If you are a business owner then you should consider using the PhoneGap framework and technology for your mobile application development projects. The big problem with mobile application development is platforms. There are multiple platforms that you must develop your mobile application for and they are ever changing. The iPhone market share is dwindling and Android and Windows 8 are growing. Even couple of years back iPhone was the choice of first platform to roll in your mobile application. Not so, in 2013. What do you do? Develop 3 native apps plus a Desktop version for your business application? That would be too costly. Usually, if you wanted to have an application for more than one of the dominant mobile platforms, you would need to build a separate application for each one. This is because each of the major mobile platform has its own coding language. Sometimes designs and user interfaces can be reused, but code cannot be so. PhoneGap can save a lot of time and money, because you are essentially building the app once then making some adjustments to get it work smoothly on the various platforms. PhoneGap makes the process more efficient by applying the motif of building once and deploying everywhere. PhoeGap allows you to develop and publish your application across multiple mobile platforms rapidly and without a lot of extra efforts. Efforts which could have gone into developing the same application for Apple/iOS, Android, Blackberry, WebOS, Windows, Symbian and Bada. PhoneGap saves you time and money from that.

Benefits of PhoneGap for Programmers

If you are web programmer proficient in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript then PhoneGap brings you new opportunities! You can build native mobile apps using the web technologies that you know and love: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Applications that are developed using PhoneGap are hybrid applications. Parts of the application – mainly the UI, the application logic, and communication with a server, is based on HTML/JavaScript. The other part of the application that communicates and controls the device (phone or tablet) is based on the native language for that platform. PhoneGap provides a bridge from the JavaScript world to the native world of the platform, which allows the JavaScript API to access and control the device (phone or tablet).

The advantages of using PhoneGap for rapid mobile application development and deploying on multiple platforms are so multifarious and to the advantages of both businesses and programmers that we would like to dub it as the Swiss Army Knife of Mobile Application Development. For projects where speed of development or cross platform support is of high importance, PhoneGap can be an awesome tool. Beyond the technology, PhoneGap is also a vibrant project, supported by a great community that continues to push the technology forward with enhancements, tutorials and examples. To illustrate the advantages of using PhoneGap in your mobile application development projects, we have created an InfoGraphic. The InfoGraphic below describes briefly what PhoneGap is, how it works and why should you care.

QuantumCloud specializes in mobile application development using PhoneGap. If you have plans to build mobile application for your business, contact QuantumCloud today.