The industry buzz surrounding PhoneGap is reaching beehive levels. It’s all good stuff, and this innovation has rightly captured the attention of some heavy hitters. Adobe is in the midst of bringing the technology in to its fold — which will likely result in a name change. For now, however, PhoneGap is the familiar handle.
For those un-familiar, PhoneGap gives you the power to write an HTML5 web app and easily deploy it across iOS and Android. It possesses pseudo-native capabilities that streamline the app dev process and circumvent the need to essentially write the app twice.
At App47, we’re excited about PhoneGap and have already published plug-ins that allow PhoneGap apps to take advantage of our features on both Android and iOS. PhoneGap fans can start taking advantage of our plugins and analytics immediately.
We think PhoneGap represents a very important milestone for application development. It lets you build a web app without worrying about meeting multiple platform requirements. You can concentrate on application innovation because it’s about the app, not the platform.
That also lowers the barrier to application development, so we’re looking forward to a fresh crop of new apps from new quarters of innovation. We’re predicting (along with plenty of other folks) that PhoneGap will find a lot of enterprise uptake. The time savings — and cost savings — speak for themselves.
The sea-change is that we’re all going to be writing apps, rather than writing for a platform. Why, in effect would anyone now bother to build multiple native apps? With PhoneGap, it’s build one and you’re done.
That’s why we’ve burnt some midnight oil to make sure the App47 suite of benefits is ready to interact with HTML5 apps. We’ve made our three code bases completely open source and available on Github:
- Plugins for Android and iOS
- Downloadable Android App
- Downloadable iOS App
The big sell is not the app dev crowd, which is sure to appreciate PhoneGap. The folks who will really appreciate it will be the C-level execs who appreciate the savings. Once we all start understanding how to benefit from PhoneGap, the days of building an app more than once are history. It means serious Cliquez sur savings and accelerated speed to market. That’s math even CEOs can do in their heads.
