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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

Same experience with phonegap + sencha touch. My personnal conclusion is that : if you're doing "business" app (aka : where data matters much more than UI responsiveness) AND you want to release the app both for Android and iOS : go Phonegap.

Otherwise, and until the majority of smartphone become as powerful as the iphone4S, stay native. With ARC, developping on iOS with Obj C has become pretty much like developping with any other language (if not better).

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What if you've already developed a (simple) Android app for consumers, and you want to enter the iOS sphere as well, but you don't have an iOS dev on the (completely bootstrapped) team? Would it be worth investing one team member's time to learn iOS development, or outsource the creation and simultaneously learn to maintain/extend the code, or to simply go with PhoneGap despite the performance drawbacks?

It's not a question that can be answered without additional context, but thoughts on various approaches for this situation would be helpful and appreciated.

In my experience it is worthwhile to learn native iOS development. Once you setup the environment and get used to XCode it is kind of fun and it doesn't take too much time. Knowledge of Android and iOS and optionally PhoneGap development will make you (or your team member) a better developer regardless of which technology you actually use. And based on that you will also be able to make an informed decision about which approach to use for a particular project.

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