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Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

No harder than getting it right in native code on 3 different platforms.

Depends on what you mean by "hard". Although it's time consuming to learn different platforms, there are not a whole lot of gotchas you have to discover on your own. It's all been done before and well documented.

PhoneGap development is hard inasmuch as there are tons of gotchas you don't know about and haven't been clearly and extensively documented.

Hard as in writing code in three different languages. Apart from that I think tech community giving too much credit for Apple and especially Google. They could have fixed this native vs html5-js-css thing two versions ago.

Three different languages that provide vastly superior runtime libraries and tooling that facilitate implementing first-class applications on the target platform.

I agree that supporting multiple platforms is suboptimal, but instead choosing a suboptimal common platform isn't any better.

We already tried that once with Java desktop applications, and Java at least tried to provide a viable common widget/platform toolkit.

No, we tried it once with web applications, and it worked brilliantly.

When did that happen? Are we reading the same article?

Sorry. What I meant was, web applications have been a successful cross platform way of delivering software for the past 10 years. I don't see any reason why it can't continue on mobile, especially now that the hardware is catching up.

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