PhoneGap is an open-source cross-platform Mobile Application development framework by Nitobi Software (now Adobe) which allows web developers to build mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
PhoneGap supports several mobile platforms, which enables web developers to write code using their existing HTML/JS skills and deploy to multiple platforms.
- Android
- iOS
- Windows
- BlackBerry
- Ubuntu
- Firefox OS
- Amazon Fire OS
- Mac OSX
- Browser
PhoneGap is not a “native application development” framework, even though it provides access through several device features using an abstraction layer, which otherwise are inaccessible to a normal web page. In simple words, it provides a “WebView” with extended capabilities.
Using PhoneGap one can access the following device features (click on links to access the fully implemented sample code repositories)
- Battery Status
- Camera
- Contacts
- Device Info
- Device Motion (accelerometer)
- Device Orientation (compass)
- Dialogs (notification)
- File
- File Transfer
- Geolocation
- Globalization
- InAppBrowser
- Media Capture
- Network Information
- Splash Screen
- Status Bar
- Whitelist
- Vibration
Since the UI rendering engine is the mobile device’s web browser, PhoneGap applications can literally look like anything. You can use standard HTML & CSS to make it look like a normal web page, you can use a UI framework like jQuery UI, Kendo UI, Sencha, Twitter Bootstrap, or Skeleton (or any other HTML/CSS/JS user interface framework). You can also use CSS styles/themes to make your web content look like native apps, such as iUI to mimic iOS or Android, or bbUI to mimic BlackBerry.
PhoneGap applications can have static UIs based on normal HTML, or can have dynamic & interactive experiences developed using JavaScript. It depends on the specific application, user experience design, target audience, and use cases to dictate how a PhoneGap application will appear.
There really are lots of ways to create a user interface with HTML, CSS & JavaScript, so there really isn’t any “typical” look. If you do not apply any CSS styles at all, then all user interface elements will use the operating system/browser default for that specific platform. This includes buttons, links, and color/highlight states. This behaves in the exact same manner as the operating system’s default web browser.
The various features PhoneGap Cross-platform mobile app development are:
- HTML5 and JavaScript
- Accessing the native apps
- Multi-platform deployment of the apps
- Benefiting from the PhoneGap built
- Implementing PhoneGap plug-in