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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Mobile Development
  5. PhoneGap vs Swift

PhoneGap vs Swift

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

PhoneGap
PhoneGap
Stacks578
Followers685
Votes94
GitHub Stars4.0K
Forks889
Swift
Swift
Stacks21.9K
Followers13.6K
Votes1.3K

PhoneGap vs Swift: What are the differences?

Developers describe PhoneGap as "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. On the other hand, Swift is detailed as "An innovative new programming language for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch". Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C.

PhoneGap can be classified as a tool in the "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" category, while Swift is grouped under "Languages".

"Javascript" is the top reason why over 44 developers like PhoneGap, while over 241 developers mention "Ios" as the leading cause for choosing Swift.

PhoneGap and Swift are both open source tools. It seems that Swift with 48.2K GitHub stars and 7.71K forks on GitHub has more adoption than PhoneGap with 4.15K GitHub stars and 974 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Swift has a broader approval, being mentioned in 979 company stacks & 526 developers stacks; compared to PhoneGap, which is listed in 86 company stacks and 34 developer stacks.

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Advice on PhoneGap, Swift

vargamatyas
vargamatyas

Nov 22, 2020

Needs adviceonPythonPythonSwiftSwiftReact NativeReact Native

Hey guys, I learned the basics (OOP, data structures & some algorithms) with Python, but now I want to learn iOS development. I am considering to learn Swift, but I am afraid how the native mobile development will die out because of the cross-platform frameworks and reviews. My idea is to learn web development first and then learn React Native, and after all of that, finally Swift. What do you think about this roadmap? Should I just learn Swift first due to the pros of the native apps?

126k views126k
Comments
Ru_Co
Ru_Co

Sep 9, 2020

Review

Hi Manish,

Well between those 2 options (Kotlin and Flutter), Flutter would be the only one that would allow you to make your app for both Apple and Android. Kotlin is for Android only. But there are other crossplatform development frameworks besides Flutter. Which one is the best for you would depend on the app you want to create and your current expertises and preferences. I've marked a few alternatives in my answer.

126 views126
Comments
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

Detailed Comparison

PhoneGap
PhoneGap
Swift
Swift

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.

Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C.

Android;Blackberry;iOS;Windows Phone;Windows8
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
4.0K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
889
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
578
Stacks
21.9K
Followers
685
Followers
13.6K
Votes
94
Votes
1.3K
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
    Created for web pages, not for complex Apps
  • 1
    Poor user experience
  • 1
    Not build for high performance
Pros
  • 259
    Ios
  • 180
    Elegant
  • 126
    Not Objective-C
  • 107
    Backed by apple
  • 93
    Type inference
Cons
  • 6
    Must own a mac
  • 2
    Memory leaks are not uncommon
  • 1
    Is a lot more effort than lua to make simple functions
  • 1
    Very irritatingly picky about things that’s
  • 1
    Its classes compile to roughly 300 lines of assembly
Integrations
No integrations available
Cocoa Touch (iOS)
Cocoa Touch (iOS)

What are some alternatives to PhoneGap, Swift?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

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.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

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