Additionally, the idea that you can "write once, deploy everywhere" is ludicrous. It has been disproved time and time again, as the market chooses native apps over apps that have been crippled to the lower-common-denominator of the range of platforms it supports.
There's a time and a place for native applications, no matter what the platform. But for a large percentage of apps in the different mobile market places writing them in HTML5 + JS wouldn't hurt them quality wise.
If you need to support an app on multiple platforms I think it makes easier to turn out a higher quality app as your attention isn't split between three different releases.
Granted, I work on private enterprise applications that the public will never get to see, but I think in a lot of cases a technology like phone gap makes a great deal of sense.
I'd argue that it has been disproved time and time again because it hasn't been done right. The ideal is native UI with platform independent backends. I get that Android and iOS have different UI paradigms, but what's going on behind the scenes is exactly the same in a lot of cases.
Appcelerator sort of provides that, but last time I tried it, it made huge bloated apps. Not good.
I can see a bright future tho in JavaScript-based game engines, so long as they're wrapped in a native app (written by a developer, not generated by an SDK).
Sure, it's the same, if you call being turing complete the same.
Phonegap basically just addresses shortfalls (read: inbuilt, intentional limitations) of the iPhone.
If iPhone supported things like image uploads from the browser, phonegap wouldn't be necessary, people would write webapps, and yes, "write once, deploy everywhere" would work, as it has for almost every major webapp ever written.
Look at desktops right now. Most of the things I do with my desktop actually happen "in the cloud", I'm just running clients for them in my browser.
The reason this can happen is that my browser isn't artificially limited, like the iPhone. Phonegap addresses this.
I never said anything like that—however, since we're on the subject, I will say that if you're an iPhone developer [1] and you don't want to learn the correct way of making apps, you're most likely going to make some very crappy apps.
[1]: By that I mean anybody making an iPhone app.
Why? Why can't iPhone developers make web apps instead?
Fully leveraging the platform to create great apps requires using the APIs the platform provides, such as:
* Using GameCenter for peer-to-peer head-to-head game matchup over bluetooth and local wifi.
* Using Airdrop for immediate no-configuration, no-network entirely local file sharing.
* Using GCD to take advantage of the iPad2's multiple cores, and implement high-performance I/O (see iOS 5).
* etc, etc.
Non-native platform shims (such as webapps) will always be behind native applications when it comes to taking advantage of the vendor's OS platform enhancements and differentiative features.
I imagine non-developers can tell that your UI is poor and non-standard, but couldn't tell you why.