jQuery Mobile

» see jquerymobile.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

jquery mobile showed up in my project list around '12 or '13. i was a few years out of university and writing web stuff for hire. i had one project that needed to look like a phone app on an ipad and on a corporate android tablet at the same time. the choice in 2012 was sencha touch (heavy) or jquery mobile (lighter, and the jquery name was a safety blanket for non-technical clients). i picked jquery mobile. it shipped on time. that one project is the reason i remember the framework.

jquery mobile launched on october 16 2010 out of the jquery foundation. john resig and the wider jquery team had been the dominant javascript utility library since 2006 and saw the iphone and ipad making the mobile web an obvious next territory. the framework was a single javascript file plus a stylesheet you dropped in alongside jquery core. you wrote html with a few data attributes. the framework rendered touch-sized buttons and animated page transitions, all from inside a single page application that did not require a backend rewrite.

the framework hit 1.0 in november 2011 after a year in alpha. its real adoption window ran from 2011 through about 2014, during which it was the default ui kit for phonegap and cordova hybrid apps that wanted to ship a mobile experience without going native. version 1.4.5 in october 2014 turned out to be the last stable release. the jquery team posted a soft deprecation hint in 2017 and finished the job on october 7 2021 with the 1.5.0 final release plus an archive notice.

~ the record ~

~ how it actually worked ~

anyway, the framework was data-attribute driven. you wrote a div with data-role="page" and jquery mobile knew it was a screen. a links with data-rel="dialog" became modal overlays. a single html document could contain multiple pages stitched together by ajax navigation, with animated transitions that mimicked native ios slide effects. the result was a hybrid app that felt close enough to native that most clients accepted it.

the part that aged badly was the dom weight. jquery mobile rewrote every form input and every button into nested wrappers with their own classes, which kept the styling consistent but ballooned the rendered html. on early android phones, where the browser was still webkit-based but underpowered, jquery mobile apps scrolled badly and animated worse. that was the experience i ran into on the project. by 2014 the framework had a reputation for being heavy on the very devices it was supposed to support.

~ the fall ~

honestly, mobile-first responsive css killed it slowly. bootstrap 3 shipped in 2013 with a responsive grid that worked on phones without a separate mobile framework. by 2015 most teams were writing one html template that rendered on phone and desktop alike, instead of a phone-only ui kit on top of jquery. react native arrived in 2015 and pulled the actual native-app builders away. by 2017 jquery mobile was already a maintenance project rather than a forward-looking one. the jquery foundation kept it alive but stopped adding features.

~ the funny part ~

anyway, the deprecation notice on the jquery blog in '21 reads like a quiet retirement letter. the team thanked the contributors and pointed to bootstrap as the obvious next stop. nobody from the framework's adoption peak in 2013 had any reason to be sad in 2021, because most of those projects had been rewritten in react or shut down years earlier. jquery mobile died after the use case it was built for had already evaporated. that is the unusual death pattern for an open-source project: not killed by a competitor, just no longer needed.

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