PhoneGap or Cordova? Don’t Confuse me and Tell me the Differences!

I am an App developer and I confess that I am a big advocate of the Hybrid Apps paradigm. Long ago I wrote the article:

As a Developer why should I worry about Hybrid Application Development?

Simply to create an app, I used the following procedure.



As you see, PhoneGap was something very essential and my best friend created Cross-Platform apps. But suddenly I found one day PhoneGap.js has been changed to something else, Coredova.js. What the heck is this?

Did my best friend change the name? Or do I need to make a friendship with someone new? I was confused and decided to get rid of this confusion.

I found a blog post on the Adobe site that clarifies many of my doubts, PhoneGap, Cordova, and what’s in a name? So essentially in this article the author’s view can be expressed in the following.



PhoneGap and Cordova is a framework (they are the same with a different name). They provide you a set of APIs to work with devices on various platforms. Using them you can access native device functions, such as a camera or contact using JavaScript functions.

PhoneGap Build is a Build Service allowing you to build and package you app in a cloud. You do not need to install any SDK locally to build the app.



PhoneGap is distributed using Apache Cordova. Now let us get it straight,



You can summarize that by saying that the current open source code base (both known as PhoneGap or Cordova) will always be free and distributed by Apachae. In the future Adobe may add more value to the current codebase and it will be branded as PhoneGap. One may need to pay for that. An example is the PhoneGap Build Service.

PhoneGap Build is a service provided by Adobe that allows you to build your app in the cloud. You do not need to install any SDK locally.



Apache Cordova is free and open source. It allows you to create mobile apps native to platforms using web technologies.

The PhoneGap mobile application development framework is the same as Apache Cordova or rather the two names are the same framework.



However PhoneGap Services will be owned by Adobe and may not be open source. But Apache Cordova will always be open source and free.