Adobe PhoneGap

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

~ the eulogy ~

phonegap showed up in my orbit around 2012. mobile dev was the big thing in ankara back then, and html-css-js wrapped in a webview was the path that didn't require learning two new sdks at once. i never shipped a phonegap app myself, but everyone i knew who was doing client work for small businesses had at least one phonegap project in their portfolio, usually a restaurant menu app or a wedding-hall booking thing.

to be fair, the framework was good at what it did. nitobi software shipped the first version at iphonedevcamp in san francisco in august 2008, back when the iphone app store was less than two months old. the pitch was straightforward. you build a normal mobile webapp. phonegap wraps it in a native shell that gives you access to the device camera, gps and storage through a javascript bridge. you submit that wrapper to the app store. you ship one app to ios, android and blackberry from one codebase.

adobe acquired nitobi on 3 october 2011 and rebranded the framework as phonegap. the open-source core was donated to the apache software foundation and became apache cordova. for the next decade those two names ran in parallel, with phonegap as the adobe-branded distribution sitting on top of the cordova engine. phonegap build was the cloud service adobe shipped in 2012 that compiled your zip of html into a native binary without you needing to install xcode.

i was not really watching by then, but adobe announced on 11 august 2020 that the phonegap brand and the phonegap build service would end on 1 october 2020. all hosted user files had to be downloaded by 30 september or they were going to be deleted. apache cordova stayed alive as an open-source project, but the adobe-branded commercial path was over.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

the technical bet phonegap made was that webviews on every mobile os would get good enough to render a real app. for a few years around 2012-2015 that was directionally true. the safari webview on ios and the chrome webview on android both shipped reasonable html5 support. the gap between a phonegap app and a native app was small enough that for the kind of work most small shops were doing, the cross-platform shortcut paid for itself in the first project.

the limitation was always performance. a phonegap app that needed real animation, real scrolling momentum or real gesture handling never quite felt right on ios. for whatever reason, the apple webview never matched the safari rendering pipeline in the bits that mattered. you could ship a content-heavy app and have it pass for native, but a game or a media-rich social app would feel obviously second-class against a native build.

~ how it actually ended ~

react native landed in march 2015 and basically dictated where the hybrid story was going. instead of putting a webpage inside a webview, react native let you write javascript that drove real native ui components on each platform. the perceived performance gap closed in a generation. flutter followed in 2017 with the same pitch but a different rendering model. by 2018 the phonegap value proposition was niche.

adobe cited declining usage when it pulled the plug. the company also wanted the team back on the adobe experience cloud roadmap. there was no acquisition. there was no successor product from adobe. the open-source cordova engine kept getting community releases, but the adobe-branded build pipeline that most enterprise customers had been using was just gone.

~ what came after ~

apache cordova is still alive on github as of the late 2020s, with releases that mostly track ios and android sdk changes. capacitor, the ionic-team successor to cordova, took over a lot of the cordova plugin ecosystem from around 2018 forward. so the technical pattern that phonegap pioneered is still in production, just under different names.

the adobe-branded chapter though is a closed file. phonegap.com redirects to an adobe knowledge base page. the medium publication that adobe used to post phonegap updates is frozen with the august 2020 farewell post at the top of the feed. if you trained your career on phonegap circa 2013 you are probably writing react native or flutter today.

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