Anyone here has any experience with phoneGap:Build service?

andregarzia

Hello Folks,

In the interest of reducing the amount of work I need to do between coding the app and releasing it, I came about the phoneGap:Build service. It appears pretty sweet but I don't know what lies beyond the pretty words and promises. Anyone here used the service and can give me a some feedback on it?

https://build.phonegap.com/

I know that phoneGap/Cordova is now an Apache Incubator thing and I don't know how this affect this service.

Thanks for any feedback
Andre

unwiredben

Cordova is the open source project, while PhoneGap is a packaging of Cordova. The whole build system is separate from the open source work and seems to be continuing as a project now that Nitobi has become part of Adobe.

I think it's worth trying it out with someone's open source project first since those are free. I've not heard any complaints about it.

andregarzia

Thanks for the reply Ben! I will test it out and post my feedback here. In the meanwhile, if anyone here has any info, please post along!

rwatkins

I've used PhoneGap build for a couple projects and for what it does, its great.

It seemed to be lagging in support for a while, but recently its been updated for WP7 and newer versions of PhoneGap.

I find it very useful for making builds when you have a "simple" project. If you need custom plugins for your PhoneGap project or need to customize something outside the scope of their config file, you then need to fall back to building yourself.

If your just using the core PhoneGap features, its great. And even if you're not, its a good way to iterate on builds until you need to include those features that require you build yourself.

andregarzia

Thanks for the reply rwatkins. One question, the whole public app thing affected you? I wonder if it will be a problem when using PhoneGap build service to build apps that I want to place on the various markets out there. The "anyone with the URL can download your app" scared me and the amount of private apps that you can create is a tad small on the cheap plans.

rwatkins

Depends on your level of paranoia.

My Enyo app, Paper Mache, is free. If someone gets a free download, I dont care.
Other companies simply refuse to use hosted solutions as a policy decision - for security and control of IP reasons.

I dont think the download URLs are 'easily guessable', I found using git to push code to their repo for builds very convenient. But there is always a pull between security and ease of use. PhoneGap Build has picked one, and for the applications I've done with it, I was comfortable with that choice.

andregarzia

Thanks for the replies rwatkins and unwiredben, much appreciated. So far, I like the phonegap build system. Very convenient. As soon as I have something useful done, I will post feedback to this thread for the benefit of others. =)