PhoneGap vs React Native

Overview

PhoneGap

Stacks578

Followers685

Votes94

GitHub Stars4.0K

Forks889

React Native

Stacks34.4K

Followers29.5K

Votes1.2K

GitHub Stars124.4K

Forks24.9K

PhoneGap vs React Native: What are the differences?

What is PhoneGap? Easilily create mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. PhoneGap is a web platform that exposes native mobile device apis and data to JavaScript. PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova. PhoneGap allows you to use standard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development, avoiding each mobile platforms' native development language. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device's sensors, data, and network status.

What is React Native? A framework for building native apps with React. React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.

PhoneGap and React Native belong to "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by PhoneGap are:

Android
Blackberry
iOS

On the other hand, React Native provides the following key features:

Native iOS Components
Asynchronous Execution
Touch Handling

"Javascript" is the primary reason why developers consider PhoneGap over the competitors, whereas "Learn once write everywhere" was stated as the key factor in picking React Native.

PhoneGap and React Native are both open source tools. It seems that React Native with 78.8K GitHub stars and 17.6K forks on GitHub has more adoption than PhoneGap with 4.15K GitHub stars and 974 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, React Native has a broader approval, being mentioned in 719 company stacks & 809 developers stacks; compared to PhoneGap, which is listed in 86 company stacks and 36 developer stacks.

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Advice on PhoneGap, React Native

Nick

CTO at Pickio

Jun 2, 2020

Decided

We built the first version of our app with RN and it turned out a mess in a while. A lot of bugs along with poor performance out of the box for a fairly large app. Many things, that native platform has, cannot be done with existing solutions for RN. For instance, large titles on iOS are not fully implemented in any of existing navigations libraries. Also there's painfully slow JSON bridge and many other small, yet annoying things. On the other hand Flutter became a really powerful and easy-to-use tool. A bit of a learning curve, of course, because of Dart, but it worth learning. Flutter offers TONS of built-in features, no JSON-bridge, AOT compilation for iOS.

491k views491k

Comments

Andrea

May 26, 2020

Needs adviceon

Vue.js

Vue Native

React

I'm a huge fan of Vue.js and I'm pretty comfortable with it. I need to build a mobile app for my company and I was now wondering whether I could make use of VueJS with Vue Native instead of switching to React. I know Vue Native builds on top of RN. My question is whether I'd have as much freedom with Vue Native over RN and whether you feel like Vue Native is "production ready" or not. Not sure of which shortcomings I may find using Vue Native... Thanks a lot!!!

336k views336k

Comments

Furqan

Jul 16, 2020

Needs adviceon

React Native

Hello guys, I am new here. So, if I posted without specific guidelines, please ignore.

Basically, I am an iOS developer and developing native apps for the last three years. Recently, I started learning React Native to develop apps for both platforms. If anyone out there knows any useful resources that will become a better react native developer.

@{#newbie}|topic:null|

325k views325k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

PhoneGap	React Native
PhoneGap is a web platform that exposes native mobile device apis and data to JavaScript. PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova. PhoneGap allows you to use standard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development, avoiding each mobile platforms' native development language. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device's sensors, data, and network status.	React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.
Android;Blackberry;iOS;Windows Phone;Windows8	Native iOS Components;Asynchronous Execution;Touch Handling;Flexbox and Styling; Polyfills
Statistics
GitHub Stars 4.0K	GitHub Stars 124.4K
GitHub Forks 889	GitHub Forks 24.9K
Stacks 578	Stacks 34.4K
Followers 685	Followers 29.5K
Votes 94	Votes 1.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros 46 Javascript 13 Backed by Adobe 11 Free 9 Easy and developer friendly 6 Support more platforms Cons 2 Never as good as a native app 1 Hard to see 1 Poor user experience 1 Not build for high performance 1 Created for web pages, not for complex Apps	Pros 214 Learn once write everywhere 174 Cross platform 169 Javascript 122 Native ios components 69 Built by facebook Cons 23 Javascript 19 Built by facebook 12 Cant use CSS 4 30 FPS Limit 2 Slow

What are some alternatives to PhoneGap, React Native?

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

Flutter

Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Xamarin

Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

NativeScript

NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.

Apache Cordova

Apache Cordova is a set of device APIs that allow a mobile app developer to access native device function such as the camera or accelerometer from JavaScript. Combined with a UI framework such as jQuery Mobile or Dojo Mobile or Sencha Touch, this allows a smartphone app to be developed with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Framework7

It is a free and open source mobile HTML framework to develop hybrid mobile apps or web apps with iOS native look and feel. All you need to make it work is a simple HTML layout and attached framework's CSS and JS files.

Qt

Qt, a leading cross-platform application and UI framework. With Qt, you can develop applications once and deploy to leading desktop, embedded & mobile targets.

Expo

It is a framework and a platform for universal React applications. It is a set of tools and services built around React Native and native platforms that help you develop, build, deploy, and quickly iterate on iOS, Android, and web apps.

Vue Native

Vue Native is a mobile framework to build truly native mobile app using Vue.js. Its is designed to connect React Native and Vue.js. Vue Native is a wrapper around React Native APIs, which allows you to use Vue.js and compose rich mobile User Interface.

Shoutem UI

Shoutem UI is a set of styleable components that enables you to build beautiful React Native applications for iOS and Android. All of our components are built to be both composable and customizable.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by PhoneGap are:

Android
Blackberry
iOS

On the other hand, React Native provides the following key features:

Native iOS Components
Asynchronous Execution
Touch Handling

"Javascript" is the primary reason why developers consider PhoneGap over the competitors, whereas "Learn once write everywhere" was stated as the key factor in picking React Native.

PhoneGap vs React Native