![]() ![]() Web Developers have honed their ability to build complex apps in the browser and are getting better and better at building high-performance experiences. Many teams are experimenting with Progressive Web App First Development. Progressive Web Apps are still nascent but there is growing frustration from developers all over the world about onerous app store requirements that limit a company's ability to reach and serve their users. This space has seen enormous change over the last decade, and it's likely we'll see a lot more in the next. The "build once run anywhere" dream is alive and well in Capacitor and Cordova land, and the many thousands of apps being built on this platform each month as well as significant enterprise traction prove web devs still want to web dev. Flutter requires web devs to throw out their JavaScript investment and their web support is not viable for Progressive Web Apps. In contrast, React Native requires developers to build their UI from scratch, won't work with most React web UI projects, doesn't support standard CSS, and can't use most react web libraries (web dev w/ React is 17x more popular than React Native). This explained the rise of Cordova/PhoneGap in the first place, and the rise of Electron for desktop.Ĭordova (and the modern alternative Capacitor) is still the only game in town for web developers that want to bring their web apps to mobile, and Ionic Framework is still the most popular UI library for them to do it. They want to use their existing skills, browser-based development process, web libraries, and code to build mobile apps. New projects like React Native, Flutter, and NativeScript have challenged hybrid app development and have brought developers more options for building apps.īut one thing that hasn't changed: web developers want to build web apps and run them everywhere. Over the years, the mobile market has changed quite a bit. Thus, the news of PhoneGap shuttering was hardly a surprise. Adobe hasn't been active in this space for many years now and Ionic has become the leader in cross-platform mobile app dev for web developers. Over the last 7 years Ionic apps built on Cordova grew to a significant portion of the app stores with millions of apps created.Īlong the way, Adobe started taking a back seat and essentially passed the torch to Ionic years ago. Ionic Framework was that library.Īdditionally, getting high performance from a web-based UI library was hard, so Ionic took the best practices for web performance and baked them into the UI library so web developers didn't have to worry about it.Īnd it took off. Ionic Framework had a simple pitch: web developers have proven they want to build mobile apps, but there was no official UI library for these apps, so developers struggled to get their UI experience on par with native. ![]() Android 2.3 was quickly dying and modern Android was just making inroads. The iPhone 5 just came out, dramatically pushing the capabilities of the web platform and mobile web performance forward. Ionic Framework was launched in 2013 right as the first era of hybrid app development was coming to an end. Web Developers never stopped honing their mobile skills and the hybrid app development ecosystem evolved to cater to them. Over time, PhoneGap would be proven right: web developers want to use their skills everywhere, and few platforms are as large and as exciting as mobile. In some cases it felt like a full on war. These developers went out of their way to trash PhoneGap and the apps that developers were creating on the platform, essentially classifying web developers building mobile apps as second-class. PhoneGap faced intense backlash from the existing native app developer world. The brilliant realization that the PhoneGap team had in the beginning was that Web Developers would want to use their existing skills, browser development workflows, and web dev teams to build mobile apps.Ĭonvincing the rest of the mobile market wasn't easy, however. I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on the hybrid app development market, thank the PhoneGap team for pioneering it, and wonder where it goes from here. Companies like Ionic have been the leader in this space for a while, so this sunset feels predictable and, frankly, a long time coming. ![]() Adobe just announced that they are shuttering PhoneGap, PhoneGap Build, and their (long non-existent) investment in Apache Cordova.Īs the pioneer of hybrid app development, aka web developers building mobile apps, this is truly the end of an era.īut it's hardly the end of the hybrid app development story. ![]()
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