Phonegap or steroid.js?

Question

I recently started studying Phonegap when I happen to read about appgyver and steroids.js.The latter seems to be a really easy and fast way to create apps.Now I am confused,should I hop on and give my full focus on learning appgyver or is there an element of phonegap which I should learn as well ?

Answer 1

It somehow depends on what platform you are going to use.

As far as I see, the iOS support of Steroids is much better than of Android, also with a higher priority on the developers future plans. Many important features are not supported on Android, like the Drawer native UI. Also, on one of my test phone(Moto G), the native UI calls in JavaScript are broken.

For me, the main reason to consider Steroids is about the native UI stuffs, but disappointing me on Android.

What's even worse, Steroids has only iOS simulator support for now. So for Android development, you can only use the AppGyver Scanner on your Android phone.

So I would suggest you to do further evaluation if you are only working for iOS, or on Android but doesn't care about native UIs. Anyway, Steroids has a better workflow though.

Update 10/18/2014:

I've been working on some PhoneGap apps recently, and I think I may have found some more things related to this topic.

1. Today's Steroids is having a much better Android support, with a fresh new Appgyver Scanner. Many native UI components are now working very well.
2. Steroids has a closed-source build system, i.e. you will have to use their build service every time you want to publish a new version of your apps. However, this is somehow necessary, as Steroids is famous for its native UI components and native transitions.
3. Steroids has a rather poor support for some of PhoneGap/Cordova plugins. This is also mainly because of the private build system. You can't build your final app by yourself in Eclipse/Android Studio/XCode like what we are doing for many other PhoneGap/Cordova apps.
4. If you want to take the advantage of native UI transitions provided by Steroids, your web project will be split into several parallel parts (who run in their own corresponding WebViews). This increases the complexity of your project, especially when you are using some web frameworks.

So, if you care a lot about native UIs, native transitions, and don't mind be bound to a proprietary platform, you can try Steroids. Otherwise, I would suggest you try Ionic(http://ionicframework.com/), which is a quite pure web implementation based on PhoneGap/Cordova.

Answer 2

I would definitely go with AppGyver. The Steroids adds the following on top of PhoneGap:

• Native UI for some elements and transitions
• Very well thought and fast workflow

I also just like you was looking into PhoneGap. Then found about Steroids and started developing with Steroids. I really like the workflow.

Answer 3

I think you should learn both since Steroids.js comes with Phongap built-in. I would think of Steroids as an upper layer to Phonegap