The Fit

You may be asking yourself if PhoneGap Build is so cool, why would you ever want to use the individual development SDKs to build your PhoneGap applications? With PhoneGap Build still in beta, there’s no clear information regarding how widely adopted it will be by the PhoneGap community. The fact that it’s going to be a for-fee service might also affect adoption of the service.

As you’ll see later in the chapter, PhoneGap Build currently uses a single application icon and a single splash screen image for all versions of the application (except for iOS). If your application needs a different branding or look and feel on different platforms, then you will need to use the native SDK approach rather than PhoneGap Build.

In my testing of the service, I found that the build process could be quite slow, although this could have been caused by the service’s beta status. With Build, the process of getting the built application onto a device, emulator, or simulator was more cumbersome than it would be on some platforms using native SDKs or even command-line tools. On platforms like Android or iOS, since there’s an IDE to work with, saving your code and then building and deploying to a simulator or emulator takes a matter of seconds.