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Apache Cordova - Leading the way to hybrid apps
February 17, 2017

Apache Cordova - Leading the way to hybrid apps

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Apache Cordova

I have been using Apache Cordova to develop hybrid enterprise mobile apps for our clients. Cordova has made it very easy to write once and adapt the apps to multiple mobile platforms.
  • Cordova makes it very easy to develop apps for multiple platforms. The setup is very simple when it comes to creating a project, adding platforms, building and deploying apps. If you have a little mobile app development experience, all you need to know is HTML, CSS, Javascript and only a handful of cordova commands to get started with your hybrid app.
  • Cordova provides a simple solution to access any and all of the device features through native plugins. You have a host of third-party and cordova plugins available to use device features like filesystem, camera, health kit, location services etc. You can also write your very own plugins and use them for your cordova based apps.
  • Cordova is free to use! The only cost you will bear is the individual mobile platform developer program enrollment cost to deploy your apps to those platforms.
  • Cordova app code runs inside a webview component. So, expect the performance to be a little slower as compared to the native apps. This is more noticeable on older devices though. It is hardly noticeable when it comes to newer mobile devices.
  • Crashes can be hard to debug since the crash logs will not point you to the culprit javascript code. This is not a limitation of Cordova alone. Any other hybrid mobile app development platform suffers the same problem.
  • Even with tools like Safari debugger and Chrome debugger, it can be tricky to measure graphics and animation performance. Achieving smooth animations can be a bit of a challenge sometimes with hybrid mobile apps in general.
  • Development timeline for making Cordova apps targeting multiple platform is lower than developing individual native apps for each platform.
  • Its easy to learn and set up. Coming from a native app development background, the learning curve for me was fairly small to get started with my hybrid app.
I have worked on Appcelerator Titanium and also on Apache Cordova and I find Cordova is a much stable, easy, performant and cost effective solution to developing hybrid mobile apps. I will go with Apache Cordova over Appcelerator Titanium any day.
Cordova is an excellent hybrid mobile app development platform that lets you build mobile apps targeted to multiple platforms.
It is free to use, simple to set up, allows you access to device features through plugins and the app performance is comparable to native apps as well. Implementing very complex animations smoothly can be a bit of a challenge. But if you are doing utility apps which focus more on features and don't go crazy with animations, there is nothing that you can't achieve with a cordova based app.