Apache Cordova: after 10 months, I won't using it anymore

There's a use case for everything. I for one am not wasting resources creating and maintaining two versions of fairly simple applications in a corporate BYO environment, like the one I'm working in. There are plenty of convenient and easy to use frameworks out there that make positioning and screen creation just as straight forward as Xcode or the android development tools.

Actually, I always find it a bit surprising Cordova doesn't have more competition.

Edit; I find the title misleading. It's not so much about Cordova as it is about hybrid app development

On performance, the new WKWebView on iOS (with Nitro JS + GPU rendering, including WebGL), and the Chromium webview on Android 5.0+ (or Crosswalk for Android 4.0+, similar features all round), radically changes the performance story. It's almost identical to the system browsers now. Facebook's comments about HTML5 were back in the dark ages when the webviews generally used horribly slow software rendering and didn't have JIT for Javascript on iOS. It's a completely different picture today. In fact, our performance-sensitive HTML5 game engine[1] targets the iOS 8 webview and Crosswalk for Android for making native apps, and they generally work as well as in the browser, which is very good, especially on newer devices. Modern web APIs are also asynchronous which helps offload work from the UI thread, and Web Workers can do that for arbitrary JS code too. For example our game engine runs A* pathfinding in a web worker, offloading any performance impact from the CPU intensive algorithm and running it in parallel to the game.

I think it's time to stop accusing webviews of being slow.

[1] scirra.com

We've been using Cordova for almost 2 years (one in production, mind you), so I beg to differ.

Granted, our applications may be different and yes, Cordova, if not done right, can be excruciatingly slow. But we have managed well. Simple things like properly paginating data (rather than trying to infinite scroll), cleaning up CSS, avoiding repeated query selections (which is a bad habit of some jQuery developers) made a huge difference[1].

Our older app is built on jQuery Mobile. The latest one is Ember. The next R&D project I'll try will probably use React with Cordova. Mobile browsers are always getting better. After a while, I have the option of using App Cache instead of Cordova, without any significant code changes (I'm not using plugins yet).

[1] Edit: And not abusing local storage.

This is a very bad article. The real problems with Cordova are:

* Core functionality is broken between releases. If you ask in the IRC support channel, they will even tell you not to update if things work well! What if I need a new feature?

* Documentation is absurdly horrible or even plain wrong. I have been told several times to refer to the source code to find out how something works.

* If you face any problem, chances are you will never find an answer in Google. You may find some StackOverflow thread if you are lucky, where several clueless people argue about things they do not know and then arrive to a wrong conclusion. (The programming skill levels of Cordova users on those communities are usually very low.)

* Critical functionality (things such as local notifications) is not included. You must rely on 3rd party plugins, that could be well maintained, or could be not maintained at all.

Yes obviously a Cordova app does not look native. It's not native and it will never be. Period.

Oh, good point. I mentioned Android 5.0+ because the 4.4 one is missing some major features including IIRC WebGL, Web Audio and WebRTC, which still rules it out for some use cases (such as a game engine).