Difference among native android app and phonegap app

Question

Recently, I came across this one stone kills multiple birds framework - http://phonegap.com/.

I do see it comes with some limitation when trying to access native features of a phone - http://www.phonegap.com/features. But it doesn't matter to me in current moment as I don't need those native features right now. (A 2D Tile game)

I was wondering, anyone of you has developed any app using the above framework? What is the differences you had found, in term of :

1. User experience on the end product. Is the product easy to install and execute? Is the product running smoothly? Is the UI look flashy? ...
2. Developer experience during development work. Can we technically achieve what we want to do easily as we can do it through native app? ...

Answer 1

Making a 2D game with phonegap is definitely possible, but it will be difficult to make the user experience as smooth as you want. I'd recommend you don't go that route.

I'd also suggest you forget about supporting Windows Phone 7 for now, use Unity3d assuming you have an extra $1,900 lying around, use Cocos2d assuming you don't have that kind of money, or investigate some other cross-platform game engine (there are so many game engines for android, it's hard for me to keep track of all of them). Cocos2d would still require you to code in two different languages, but at least its Api is relatively similar between iPhone and Android that it would cut down on the porting work you'd have to do.

Another option still is Flash builder (and using their code generator for the iPhone), but I'd recommend against it because its iPhone code base has stagnated too much recently, and it will take time for it to become usable again on the iPhone-side of things.

Another game engine I'd recommend is AndEngine (AndEngine.org), but that would be for Android only. That one has no iPhone equivalent, but still this is one that I'd highly recommend anyway.

Answer 2

Phonegap takes a HTML+CSS+JavaScript page and wraps an application around it. So if you can build a mobile website that you want to distribute as an app on many platforms, phonegap is the way to go. But of course a mobile app doesn't feel the same as a native one.

Point your mobile phone to this showcase if you want to get an impression on how mobile websites might look like. You might also consider phonegap when you have a background in web development and native phone development would be completely new for you.