Developing mobile apps natively or use JavaScript or HTML5 frameworks like PhoneGap or Appcelerator

March 20, 2015

In this tutorial I discuss and evaluate pros and cons of whether you should develop your mobile applications natively in Android or iOS, or use frameworks like PhoneGap or Appcelerator with JavaScript or Sencha with HTML5 in order to maintain just one code base but be able to compile that code base into multiple apps like an iPhone app, iPad app, Android app and even a Blackberry app.

Check out my mobile app business book and my mobile app business course.

Personally, for my apps I decided to code the apps natively. Either approach has its pros and cons. The benefit of developing apps natively is that you have much more flexibility in what you do on either platform. In my case, since I had two different code bases I was able to make many small app releases on Android, and test many things out. Once some of the features I was testing became successful, I slowly added them to my iOS (iPhone and iPad) apps.

The problem with having to maintain multiple code bases is that it is expensive in terms of development time and skilled resources that need to be devoted to this. It is much faster to use a JavaScript or HTML5 app development framework like PhoneGap, Sencha, or Appcelerator.

If you have the resources, try to develop your apps natively. At least that is my advice.