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Just because an app is using something like PhoneGap doesn't mean it will provide you with a inferior experience than a native app. A lot of apps these days are using things like PhoneGap and Xamarin Studio, you just don't realize it. Browse to the list of apps built with PhoneGap below, you'll be surprised how many popular apps were built using Javascript and HTML5:

http://phonegap.com/app/

I looked at the list. I have used the web version of 2048. No other app is something I have seen. So please answer the question in the comment you replied to: Name one app written using a cross-platform framework that normal people willingly choose over a native alternative. I am not saying all phonegap apps are junk. I am saying that for the vast majority of phonegap apps, you can find a better alternative that is written to the native API of the platform.

You can built incredible apps and UI using PhoneGap. Browse the list below and you'll be surprised how many popular apps are built using nothing more than Javascript and HTML5:

http://phonegap.com/app/

Just because an app is using something like PhoneGap doesn't mean it will provide you with a inferior experience than a native app. A lot of apps these days are using things like PhoneGap and Xamarin Studio, you just don't realize it. Browse to the list of apps built with PhoneGap below, you'll be surprised how many popular apps were built using Javascript and HTML5: http://phonegap.com/app/

This is fading away. The better solution is something like PhoneGap. This lets you build mobile cross platforms apps in HTML/JavaScript.

Since Phonegap got bought by Adobe you are better off with the open source port of PhoneGap Apache Cordova.

This is fading away. The better solution is something like PhoneGap. This lets you build mobile cross platforms apps in HTML/JavaScript.

No, it is named after Cordova Street in Vancouver where Nitobi, the original developer of PhoneGap, had an office.

Phonegap

Or HTML5.

Cordova's API is the spec. When you target Cordova's API, you're targeting what will eventually be native browser APIs. Have a look here for more info: http://phonegap.com/2012/05/09/phonegap-beliefs-goals-and-philosophy/

And Javascript is an excellent intermediatory language.

Apache Cordova is an interesting project aimed at building native apps on most smartphone platforms using HTML, CSS and Javascript to describe the app.

  http://docs.phonegap.com/en/1.8.1/index.html

We also believe that developers will overwhelmingly support our approach, because 75 percent of applications are already designed in HTML5...

Wrong. The ability to make money by writing for a platform generally determines if developers will flock to that platform. Even if the apps are already in HTML5, if it's not worth a developer's time to spend 5 minutes making an app bundle and uploading it, they won't bother, no matter how simple you make it. And platforms aren't free. Even if you could snap your fingers and make a version for Mozilla, that's still yet another platform and yet another group of users you have to support.

Also:

By... adopting standards such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, we want to attract hundreds of thousands of web developers on OS Firefox. No need to learn the development languages of Apple or Google.

One word (ok, sorta two): PhoneGap

And finally: how did "ZOMG apps can be written in HTML5!!!!!11" work out for Palm?

No other phone will allow you to make an app directly out of HTML, JS and CSS.

Um, the iPhone. You can _absolutely_ make a web app out of HTML, JS, and CSS.

Notice the difference. With Boot 2 Gecko, the apps are "real" apps that can access hardware, make phone calls, etc. But they are also standard web apps. The aim (as far as I can tell) is to take everything that they need to implement for hardware access and standardize it, perhaps handing it over to the W3C, so that other browsers will implement it. At that point, we can have full, cross-platform apps, publishable and accessible from individual URLs, that run on every platform that Mozilla runs on. It's a big, bold goal, and if they can achieve it native apps are going to be in trouble. At the end of the day, would you rather develop your app multiple times for multiple platforms, and rely on third party app stores to distribute and take 1/3 of your revenue, or do you want to develop it once, have it run on multiple platforms and be able to keep 100% of your revenue? This is the whole reason the web was created, to give all devices and manufacturers standards that they could compete in implementing, whilst still retaining cross-platform compatibility.

You jest, but one of the interesting things about Boot 2 Gecko is that all the apps are just localled cached web apps, which means that they get "updated" seamlessly without having to interact with an app store or package manager. You get all of the updating advantages of a web app like Google Docs or Gmail, in that installation and upgrading is completely invisible to the user. Even the included apps (the launcher, the dialler, photo viewer, web browser, etc.), which would be native on any other platform, are all just web apps loaded from a particular URL - you can access the same URL using Firefox on a desktop PC, or from an Android phone running Firefox Mobile, and those apps will run. It's the cross platform solution that eliminates the need for native code (think Phone Gap).

Mozilla is aiming to produce a platform that will make apps just an extension of the web. And to standardize everything that they need to do, so that other platforms can implement their APIs. Is it possible for everything? Perhaps not. Does it feel like we are throwing away decades of work on native code? Perhaps, but the web stack of HTML and Javascript is the only cross-platform, globally accepted solution we have. Google tried to add native code to Chrome - it's impressive, it works, but nobody's using it. We had Java applets on the web, but those are effectively dead now. There are projects now that can compile from native code to Javascript - see this amazing demo of Sauerbraten in Javascript running with accelerated WebGL. It's not difficult to imagine a world where Javascript is basically the common bytecode, and with bridges to native APIs it becomes possible to access all hardware, do anything, from a web app that is running on any platform, be it iOS, Windows, Android, Linux, etc.

As I wrote in another comment: the current situation with apps is a bit of a throwback - can you imagine if viewing a web site required you to install it through an app store? And for an author, updating their web site required them to push their site to Dell, who would then approve it and push it out to people with Dell computers? But you need a different web site for people with Asus computers, and you have to push your Asus-build site to them for approval and redistribution? It's crazy, if that were the situation with the web it would've never taken off. Making apps more like the web, or expanding the web to consume apps, whichever way you look at it, is a good thing.

And if you sign up for PhoneGap Build, you can make mobile apps for the most popular platforms using only javascript and HTML5

There's also PhoneGap.

http://phonegap.com/

http://www.rhomobile.com/

http://www.phonegap.com/

what?

I'm not particularly interested in native development, maybe I should be, but I've looked at a number of technologies, initially Flex with deploy via Air, then Phonegap and finally settling on Appcelerator.

Particularly for slower Android phones, Phonegap HTML5 apps really suck with many reviews having the classic "really like the app, but it was just too slow to be use-able". This is a killer and this issue will go away in the first world, but will never go away in the developing markets, just look at Aakash.

So at the moment, if you are careful with your component solution, Appcelerator offers (IMHO) the 'best' cross-platform native compile solution (it even has a webKit plugin so you can deliver HTML5 apps) for iOS/Android. Blackberry is in beta and I have no idea when WP7 will be supported.

One downside....you need to buy a Mac.

Granted, I haven't read all the documentation, but I don't see anything in ExtJs that would help you to write a native mobile application for iPhone/iPad, Android, and Blackberry with a single code base that:

Right on the front page of the Sencha Touch section is a paragraph about how it integrates with PhoneGap to provide a single code base that allows access to native APIs on 6 platforms (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Symbian, Bada).

http://www.phonegap.com/about/features

That has already happened, at least on the mobile front. Take a look at PhoneGap.

You can expect the APIs on this kind of thing to become standardized in a few years.

Look at phone gap. I just discovered it today, so I don't know if it's any good, but it looks like what you're talking about.

There needs to be a browser that exposes in JavaScript a common API for phone I/O: accelerometer, multi-touch, camera, GPS. etc.

Um that part already exists: http://www.phonegap.com/

If you learn HTML/CSS/Javascript you can target Android/IOS and the Web.

Tools you can use include:
Appcelerator
Sencha Touch plus Phonegap

You can read this article for more information and other options.

and Windows Phone and Symbian..... NO. Just learn HTML, javascrpit and css and use PhoneGap!!!! http://www.phonegap.com/

I think that's the hard part.

Think about developing a handheld game that needs to work on all screen sizes (iPhone, iPad, Android, Simbian, etc etc....). There have been efforts to minimize these problems.

Then think about the UI for a web page or game. There have been some pretty successful results, while they are anything but simple.

Now think about adding a 3rd dimension to all those problems. It's not as easy as saying "just make it realistic". There is a reason why lives are spent on UI. It's not an easy task and it just got a 3rd Dimension.

Oh and was it just me or did anyone think it was just a 3D FPS (Like Tribes, Q3, you know.... All FPS?) and not a 3D Displayed FPS.

Much as I like to be other wise genie is out of the bottle here , only thing we can do is to keep design of your app as platform neutral as possible. than attack the implementation part with tools for cross platform development , Java , J2ME is one way , there are other tools like Mobile Distelry ,Phonegap and Mitr trying to solve this problem only . but we have a long way to go on this . for more detail i suggest you read this excellent paper from a NUS professor named RAJAPAKSE . it will give you a lot of insight about the same .
Disclaimer : I work for SpiceLabs the company behind Mitr

I checked out the posted demos on my iPhone. Although they were a tad sluggish (particularly the star fade-in on the first demo), frankly, it wasn't bad. Some of the sluggishness could have just been because the demos are getting Slashdotted.

Personally, I'm a little more interested in PhoneGap, which lets you use JavaScript to create iPhone apps (outside the browser).

There are a lot of Phonegap-based apps in the App Store, too. But there have been a lot of rejections as well. Apple doesn't like you using third-party frameworks. This will be no exception -- a couple of apps in the App Store is not evidence that it's OK to use 3rd-party frameworks.

Yeah, but there's no rule that says that the code has to be hand-written. If it uses all the right APIs chances are that Apple will never even notice how the app was generated in the first place.

No, there is no specific rule, but there are a lot of complaints from developers using Phonegap. This framework allows HTML/JavaScript based development on iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Apps developed using this framework have been rejected from the App Store in unusually high percentages.

There are a lot of unwritten rules to the App Store as well. One of them is: don't use frameworks.

PhoneGap is not an "external API" any more than any other piece of open source code is.

Open source is orthogonal to the issue; the same issues would exist were it closed source.

The title page for PhoneGap's website, is "Cross platform mobile framework". It's a 3rd party API for various device-specific features (geolocation, vibration, accelerometer, etc) and lets you access them from Javascript. Point your UIWebView at a website instead of local content and now you're loading and executing new interpreted code on the fly (Javascript that gets turned into system API calls). So yeah, this framework seems to be against Apple's rules of no external code loading and no interpreters.

The other thing to consider is that Apple has resisted allowing 3rd party APIs to become the development target. They want you to make an iPhone app, not a cross-platform PhoneGap app.

is your APP pure HTML, or does it contain JavaScript code like the PhoneGap project uses?

If it contains JavaScript code, maybe Apple didn't like the way it was designed as it was similar to the old PhoneGap code they rejected, did you update your JavaScript code to the new PhoneGap codebase that was approved, or did you remove the old PhoneGap code with different JavaScript code?

If your APP is HTML with JavaScript, Apple might have an issue with that. Sometimes JavaScript code can do nonstandard things that locks up a web browser or causes incompatibility issues. When I programmed in JavaScript I had to keep changing my code to changing Web browser standards, as soon as a new web browser was released, the way JavaScript worked would change and I had to change my code to accommodate it.

If it is pure HTML, there might be tags you are using that Apple finds non-standard and thinks they might run exploited code.

Here is a story on why Apple rejected the PhoneGap framework in the first place.

Yeah I know, Apple wants to protect their users and set quality control standards high, and they include such rules as not using third party or open source frameworks, and Apple does not want the APP modified on the iPhone after being bought, Apple does not want the APP to run on a competitor's phone (HTML and JavaScript applications can easily be ported to another format), and PhoneGap type applications may not work on future iPhones, it is all a matter of risk management. Apple does not want to risk anything so it sets strict guidelines on what an iPhone APP can and cannot do.

Yeah ironically Apple has exchanged freedom for security, and in doing so shut out developers like yourself. Even something as simple as HTML code and/or JavaScript has to be reviewed and has a possibility of being rejected. It goes against the open source philosophy, I don't know what else to say. Even Microsoft is not that strict on what can and cannot be done on their smart phones or Windows OS. Except to say that Microsoft's products are more prone to exploits and viruses and other malware, and maybe Apple is doing this kind of thing to prevent exploits in their iPhone?

I'm impressed with my G1 out-of-the-box (coming from a T-Mo Dash). And as long as there are significant improvements I will be delighted with it.

I use Eclipse for Java development on my job but I didn't want my leisure coding activity to feel like work so I went poking around. I stumbled across http://phonegap.com/ which is an add-on to the Eclipse/Android SDK that allows developers to create apps using html and javascript.

I downloaded, installed it, and manage to compile the sample code pretty easily. Reminds me a bit of ForwardPass for the PocketPC.

I haven't investigated this, but it appears that PhoneGap (mentioned above) can access the accelerometer, the location api, do sound, and vibration.

I'm working on a GWT framework for the iphone that will allow you to write a web application

Perhaps something like SproutCore or Cappuccino or PhoneGap?

(Not that there's anything wrong with a new project. :) Just wanted to make sure you knew. )

A web app can get surprisingly close to being indistinguishable for native thanks to a few features in MobileSafari like:

This is true, and it's one of the reasons Apple tried to get people to swallow the "The Web is your Dev Kit" line.

It's also funny how people overlook this when they start griping about how venal and/or controlling Apple is.

I was one of those people saying it wouldn't be enough. And I still do think it's not enough for some things.

Making a 3D game and using hardware openGL acceleration is tough to do in with HTML5 :)

I just meant that it's a nice option to have to build some applications. It also allows to make things somewhat cross platform with PhoneGap ( http://phonegap.com/ ) because things like GPS and motion sensors are already abstracted and the implementation to another webkit device wouldn't be difficult.