Should I use PhoneGap instead of ramping up on the Android SDK?

Question

Although I am comfortable with Java, I have much more experience with web development. I am looking to get into programming simple Android games.

Should I just program e

Answer 1

I have just spent the past week or so developing a simple Android app using PhoneGap. My great hope was to be able to recommend this product for use in our department as a "write-once, deploy everywhere solution."

In practice, it was more complicated than I would have hoped. I did manage to get an Android version of the app done, but I found a lot of quirks in using basic stuff like getting it to include css and the jquery mobile framework. I kept thinking that this was just my learning curve but a lot of the tutorials I found online were outdated and didn't work in the version I downloaded. The biggest surprise was that you can't link to external documents without using a plugin such as childBrowser, which is a huge drawback.

I tried today to port my app over to iOS and could not get past step one with importing css. I couldn't find any support documentation on this basic step. It's frustrating because this is a simple app that I could craft as native in Xcode in a day or so. It looks like it will take me a lot longer using PhoneGap.

PhoneGap looks really promising, but at the moment I don't want to use it. It's just a question of time. Why would I want to take twice as long on something? It might be a better choice in future versions