HACKER Q&A
📣 _448

Anyone using Apache Cordova for cross-platform development?


My goal is to update the cross-platform apps dynamically. I looked at react native, and even though it uses JavaScript on the client side, due to the JSX compiler it will be difficult to update the app dynamically(that is my understanding, please correct me if I am wrong).

So, the only option available is Cordova. If you are using Cordova for cross-platform apps development, what is your experience? And what are its pros and cons?

  👤 null_object Accepted Answer ✓
My experience is from 3-4 years ago, and so is by no means up-to-date, but I naively thought that this tooling was now defunct, and development had moved to React-Native or other cross-platform solutions like Flutter.

As a team we gave up on Cordova at that time, because the development process was buggy, lagged behind new releases for iOS and/or Android - which left us with an application that couldn't be updated until framework issues were fixed - and was generally frustrating and slow compared to the experience of native development for each platform separately.

Furthermore getting each app to feel 'right' on it's respective platform was a constant struggle, and we never successfully achieved that aim. Switching to native development was liberating, far more satisfying from a developer-perspective, more performant for end-users, and allowed us to react quickly to changes in each targeted OS separately.

Hope my input is helpful, even though it may now be outdated.