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Comment by gagege | Hacker News Reader

Just spending 5 minutes with PhoneGap was enough to convince me that it isn't ready for professional app development, performance wise. That was 2 years ago and I'd hoped it had improved quite a bit since then.

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The thing is, the web will never ever catch up to native. The web is too fragmented, has too many libraries, differing philosophies and paradigms, and is too far removed from the hardware to even compete. You think you'll ever see something like Flipboard built on Phonegap? Pretty unlikely.

Hey guys, I work at Famo.us and we've recreated the Flipboard flipping interaction in Famo.us as an internal demo and wrapped it in Cordova with great success. I'll look into publishing this as a demo or making it public.

Look forward to seeing it. Thanks!

The thing is that the web doesn't need to catch up to native. The web just needs to satisfy the definition of "quality" held by the majority of users, where "quality" is defined as "fitness for use".

It's not only possible, but almost certain that the web will achieve acceptable performance for 99% of use cases in the next 1-2 years. After that, the web ends up with greater "fitness for use", since they can be ephemeral (instant, on-demand, no installation required), which native apps cannot do.

The only place where native is likely to hold out for the long term is 3D head mounted displays like the Oculus Rift.

Actually, a pure content app like Flipboard I could easily see being developed on Famous/PhoneGap.

There's a big argument against doing something like that in PhoneGap. Phonegap/JS does not have (low-overhead, easy to use) multithreading. I can guarantee you that something like Flipboard is loading/marshalling all the content and data in a background queue of some sort. Maybe even doing some background rendering.

It bears noting that running background tasks in iOS is extremely easy for developers.

I bet a Flipboard-clone wouldn't be too difficult for a few engineers to bang out in Famo.us. But then again, the value of Flipboard isn't in being a beacon of iOS beauty and functionality, but instead lies in the apps wonderfully-curated content.

If Flipboard had any regular, perceptible lag, no one would use it.

You don't think that's possible on JavaScript/PhoneGap?

It's not currently possible today (Web Workers are high-overhead and quite limited) and I haven't seen it in any of the standards for browsers that will be implemented for the foreseeable future. Are there any solutions you can think of?

Famo.us?

Does famo.us do multithreading? (hint: no, because JS can't do multithreading except for high-performance-overhead, clunky Web Workers)

Keep in mind that the performance here is that of mobile WebView components, not PhoneGap particularly. Mainly PG just creates a shell app that creates a WebView and then runs your content in it. So whether your content would perform better today than two years ago is a matter of whether iOS and Android have improved their WebViews[0]. PhoneGap, for its part, has added more platforms and gotten a much improved extension system in the last two years, but nothing I know of that would seriously affect performance.

[0] Android WebViews seem to improve steadily, while always lagging a bit behind the real browser. iOS WebViews were crappy for a long time, particularly because Apple kept Nitro for themselves while third-party hybrid apps used a way slower JS engine. But iOS 8 apparently made massive strides here, and WebViews are right on par with mobile Safari (Nitro, WebGL, etc). Or so they say; I haven't tried it out yet.

PhoneGap can only do so much, it is mostly just wrapping your HTML/JS/CSS. Finally those languages are starting to get close to what a native app can do (with significantly less development time, perfect for prototyping).

Native is not about the languages, it is about the frameworks. HTML/JS/CSS are so far away from what native SDKs offer it is not even funny.

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