Adobe PhoneGap falls between the cracks thanks to new Apple requirements, developers fume

Developers using Adobe's PhoneGap framework for building mobile apps for iOS and Android may soon be unable to submit to Apple's App Store, thanks to Adobe's use of an old iOS SDK. PhoneGap is Adobe's commercial version of Apache Cordova, an approach to cross-platform development based on using web browser technology. Adobe …

[ThomH]

Good riddance

As someone who once struggled through maintaining once such project, PhoneGap/Cordova is an absolutely terrible framework — it's a web view with a bunch of half-hearted JavaScript emulations of system UI components, plus a random grab bag of other components you might remember from desktop computers in the 1990s, with a bridge into Objective-C that occasionally works to some limited extent. Good luck to you when it doesn't, since there is no way to attach a debugger.

If you want to provide your UI via the web, just do that. Your tools will be better, the user experience will be better, everyone will be happier.

[J27]

Yeah...

I'd say half-ass ia a pretty good assessement. There are a lot of better alternatives that may be fairly easy to implement depending on how people have built their Phone Gap apps. React Native and Nativescript off the top of my head. Phone Gap was V1 for packaging web apps for phones, there are many better options now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe do have a habit of abandoning their old frameworks...it happened to AIR on Linux a while back...

The lesson here seems to be don't trust Adobe with your software. They're perfectly capable of putting together a team to update their software to comply with the new rules...they just choose not to.

[J. Cook]

Yep.

Remember, these are the same chuckleheads that thought putting a full-featured scripting engine into a document viewer intended for rendering postscript on a computer instead of a printer with zero thought or planning about the security implications surrounding it was a good idea...

(No, I'm not letting that one go. Ever.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yep.

I like PDF. It's a good idea. But they should never have made it interactive.

I'm still mad at them for buying Cool Edit, turning it into Audition and making it suck.

Between that, and this, and Creative Cloud, and 15 years of Flash bugs, and abandonment of AIR and...oh...why do people keep giving them money?

[Henry Wertz 1]

What you don't constantly upgrade your build environment?

What, you don't constantly upgrade your build environment? XCode 11.3.x and ios 13 sdk has been out for almost 6 months.

In all seriousness... I'm not commenting on the quality of PhoneGap or Codova (I assume it's just as ThomH says..), but Apple really does keep their developers on quite the treadmill.

I do keep my copy of Android Studio up to date and make sure my software will build on it; but, I "could" still build for like Android 2, with the studio software from way back then, and my app would still run on Android 10, and Google would not show up and say that it's against the rules to do so if I put that app up on Google Play. In my case, I followed normal programming practices and my apps are not complicated, so I've only had to update a line or two in my build properties, no code. But, the potential downside of course is someone who finally updates their build environment after years then have loads and loads of build problems and (since they haven't had to work around them over time, one at a time) having to fix them all at once could be overwhelming.

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Migrate?

To what?

I want to build Cordova apps for iOS and Android, in the cloud, with my keys.

Ie run command, get back to packages.

What are the options?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Migrate?

Give Apple the finger, of course. Forcing developers to adopt their useless Apple login is just the latest of their stupid shenanigans. They need to be taught a lesson, but until developers rebel, that's not going to happen.

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Re: Migrate?

Sadly that won't fly with customers...

[IGotOut]

Re: Migrate?

That's why he posted as AC. I guess adolescent without real world business experience. Must be hard for him to type with that foam pouring from his mouth (and yes I presume it's a HE).

[ThomH]

Re: Migrate?

Apple has sold Apple login as significantly more private than Google or Facebook — if you sign in with Apple's mechanism then the receiving company gets only: confirmation that your sign-in was successful along with your selected user name and a service-specific randomised email address that Apple will forward to your real email address.

So good luck to you starting a rebellion against that. Your company thinks it's completely unacceptable that Apple is forcing your developers not to harvest your users' email addresses, lists of all the other apps they're signed into, etc? It's political correctness gone mad!

[Stuart Castle]

Re: Migrate?

Yes. How dare Apple act to try and stop developers harvesting users personal details. If Google and Facebook would do the same, then there wouldn't be a need for anyone else to do so. The problem is, that kind of data harvesting is the reason Google and Facebook make money. Apple have a rather profitable hardware (and software) business that enables them to offer this kind of service for free without harvesting data.

[Alex H.]

Re: Migrate?

You can try using Voltbuilder if you're still looking for an alternative. It works well for both iOS and Android