PhoneGap Build is Awesome

Recently I’ve taken my first steps into the world of hybrid applications and found Adobe PhoneGap Build to be absolutely brilliant and essential. You may not believe this if you have seen some of my Twitter comments, but it’s true.

The hybrid application in question was built using jQuery Mobile and HTML5, with any data being retrieved via AJAX. It had to work on web browsers and also be an installable “native” application for Android and iOS.

This is where PhoneGap Build came in.

You upload your code to the website in a zip file (or you can link it to a GitHub repository) and PhoneGap build will compile installable versions of your code for Android, iOS (key required), Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Phone and WebOS.

Your applications can also use the PhoneGap API which the build process will convert into device specific code to allow access to things such as the camera, compass and contacts.

This just makes things so much easier than having to do it yourself and therefore is invaluable for hybrid application development.

Improvements

However. As alluded to above, I recently have been tweeting about the service being bad, but you can safely ignore that as I was just being a bit ranty.

Adobe offically launched PhoneGap Build the other week, and with that comes a pricing model and more people using the service and it can’t really cope. At times the whole build site goes down, or uploading your code takes ages and times out or some application builds either fail to work with no indication as to why or they take ages to build.

Adobe need to improve the service for it to stay as useful as it already is. Here’s a list of things that they need to do which, in my opinion, would improve PhoneGap Build:

I know that Adobe don’t need people like me telling them how to improve their services, and chances are all of the above and more are in the pipeline for this service.

I look forward to such changes and improvments and will of course still continue to use PhoneGap Build as it is quite simply, awesome.