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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Mobile Development
  5. Apache Cordova vs Visual Studio App Center

Apache Cordova vs Visual Studio App Center

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Apache Cordova
Apache Cordova
Stacks686
Followers892
Votes218
GitHub Stars955
Forks345
Visual Studio App Center
Visual Studio App Center
Stacks113
Followers232
Votes4

Apache Cordova vs Visual Studio App Center: What are the differences?

Developers describe Apache Cordova as "Platform for building native mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript". 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. On the other hand, Visual Studio App Center is detailed as "Continuous everything – Build, Test, Deploy, Engage, Repeat". Automate the lifecycle of your iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps. Connect your repo and within minutes build in the cloud, test on thousands of real devices, distribute to beta testers and app stores, and monitor real-world usage with crash and analytics data. All in one place.

Apache Cordova and Visual Studio App Center belong to "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Apache Cordova are:

  • Cross-platform (CLI) workflow
  • Platform-centered workflow
  • Hundreds of plugins

On the other hand, Visual Studio App Center provides the following key features:

  • Build
  • Test
  • Distribute

Apache Cordova is an open source tool with 834 GitHub stars and 337 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Apache Cordova's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Apache Cordova has a broader approval, being mentioned in 166 company stacks & 446 developers stacks; compared to Visual Studio App Center, which is listed in 19 company stacks and 46 developer stacks.

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Advice on Apache Cordova, Visual Studio App Center

Aleksandr
Aleksandr

Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft at Microsoft-365

Dec 23, 2019

Review

What is Proguard?

ProGuard is the most popular optimizer for Java bytecode. It makes your Java and Android applications up to 90% smaller and up to 20% faster. ProGuard also provides minimal protection against reverse engineering by obfuscating the names of classes, fields and methods.

How to use it in Cordova app?

I didn't find any plugins for it. So I've implemented it by myself and shared it on GitHub.

Feel free to use!

119k views119k
Comments
Aleksandr
Aleksandr

Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft at Microsoft-365

Dec 23, 2019

Needs advice

I've done some Hybrid Mobile apps with both technologies Apache Cordova and React Native and described my experience in my blog.

In a few words, I would suggest to use each technology in accordance what what is your current code base and what do you want to achieve.

React Native is a great option if you need that extra edge in performance with multi-threading and native UI rendering. Or you already have a web app based on React which you want to port to mobile.

On the other hand, if you have an existing web application code and you want to reuse some or all, including the ability to use web third-party libraries, then Cordova is the best option.

429k views429k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Apache Cordova
Apache Cordova
Visual Studio App Center
Visual Studio App Center

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.

Automate the lifecycle of your iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps. Connect your repo and within minutes build in the cloud, test on thousands of real devices, distribute to beta testers and app stores, and monitor real-world usage with crash and analytics data. All in one place.

Cross-platform (CLI) workflow;Platform-centered workflow;Hundreds of plugins
Build; Test; Distribute; Crashes; Diagnostics; Analytics; Push; CD/CI;
Statistics
GitHub Stars
955
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
345
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
686
Stacks
113
Followers
892
Followers
232
Votes
218
Votes
4
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 48
    Lots of plugins
  • 35
    JavaScript
  • 26
    Great community
  • 25
    Easy Development
  • 18
    Easy to learn
Cons
  • 2
    No native performance
  • 1
    Hard to install
  • 0
    Hard to install
Pros
  • 1
    Show error issues for mobile devices
  • 1
    Slack integration
  • 1
    For Mobile apps diagnostics and tracking
  • 1
    Bug tracking integration
Integrations
No integrations available
GitHub
GitHub
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps
Slack
Slack

What are some alternatives to Apache Cordova, Visual Studio App Center?

Jenkins

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Ionic

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.

Travis CI

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

Flutter

Flutter

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

React Native

React Native

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.

CircleCI

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

Xamarin

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

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.

TeamCity

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

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