How To Efficiently Create Responsive Cross-Platform Apps Using PhoneGap?

The competition in mobile app market is getting fierce each day. Every enterprise is striving to create unique, interactive mobile apps to attract and engage customers for a longer time. But developing such applications is not fun. Plus developing an app for multiple platforms individually is even a tedious chore for developers.

Consequently, enterprises prefer to hire PhoneGap developers for developing cross-platform mobile applications. Such cross-platform apps can be developed faster as it makes it easier for developers to share the app logic on multiple operating systems in one go. One of the best platforms developers leverages while creating cross-platform applications is PhoneGap. It is one such platform that developers can utilize with their existing web developer skills.

PhoneGap is an open-source framework for creating multi-platform mobile apps using web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It allows PhoneGap developers to use standardized web APIs to target the OSes including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, and Symbian. It is completely based on web standards with which responsive apps can be built and customized as per the user’s requirements.

However, there are some specific problems that can obstruct you from creating responsive mobile apps in PhoneGap. So, let's take a look at the problems listed below to understand and figure out how you can deal with them while creating PhoneGap based responsive apps.

Problem #1 - Lag between Touch & Click Event on Touch Screens:

Generally, there’s a lag of 300 milliseconds in a touch device browser between a touch to be considered as a click for generating an event. This means there is a timeout of 300 milliseconds to avoid a false click which is often done accidently. This can cause a problem while generating responsive apps that can quickly respond to user’s clicks or actions. There are JavaScript libraries like TouchStart and TouchEnd to track such events. When you perform the TouchEnd, a click event runs. But finding such libraries which can accurately work with various input fields on multiple mobile platforms is difficult. Thus, it is better to generate a custom or tap event instead of a click event. This way you can create apps that are highly responsive to touch events.

Problem #2 - DOM Structure Optimization:

DOM structure optimization is an essential part of PhoneGap app development process. Let’s assume you have about 100 to 200 DOM objects or elements in a page and 5 to 15 such pages. You choose an element of a page and move to another one for displaying the result. There’s a mechanism that stores the data between these pages. But JavaScript applications or the WebView PhoneGap component does not have this mechanism. In such a scenario, the best alternative is to load the page content with Ajax queries and detach the DOM branches responsible for invisible pages from the main DOM tree. Also, ensure to save the links to the branches within JavaScript.

By considering the above-listed problems and solutions, you can certainly create an efficient and responsive PhoneGap mobile app. It is highly recommended to take help of a PhoneGap app development company who can provide you with professional app development services catered to your requirements.

Do you know of any other common issues that are likely to come across while developing a responsive cross-platform apps using PhoneGap? Please list them down in the comment box below. 

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Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.

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