Xamarin vs PhoneGap vs Sencha: Unbiased Comparison

As the mobile app development industry grows, mobile app technology and the operating system for each mobile have also been tremendously changing. To overcome the concept of developing a separate mobile app for each platform(Native coding), there is a different approach called Cross-Platform Development. Let's take a quick look at what exactly is Cross-Platform Development.



The top cross-platform tools available as of now are PhoneGap, Xamarin, Sencha and Qt.

Xamarin lets you write cross-platform mobile apps using C# and .NET. Using AXML we can develop the UI of the application and C# can be used to code all platforms. The performance is pretty good and comparable to Native. Moreover, coding for iOS / Android can be done on one IDE: Xamarin IDE or Visual Studio. The cost of the Xamarin license is not cheap. Xamarin is mainly for Windows Phone and Windows 8 (Metro) apps.

Read More about - Thing you need to know before building apps using Xamarin

PhoneGap applications are built using HTML, JavaScript and CSS the application . The PhoneGap/Cordova are simple to install like other native applications. These application can access to native device APIs which can be extended in a modular way. There are a lot of plugins to choose from enabling developers to focus on the web-based skills they already have. Cordova is an open source and free framework and so there are no licensing costs

As there are a lot of plugins available , the plugin architecture works well if you can find the plugins you need or if we can write our own plugins

Sencha is also an HTML5 mobile application framework for building web applications that looks and feels like native applications. Native packaging is possible via Apache Cordova/PhoneGap or Sencha’s SDK. Sencha have produced a larger quantity of interoperable products, from Sencha Architect. Sencha Touch offers an MVC style architecture.

If developers aren’t disciplined in writing efficient JavaScript it will give the same performance as the application built in PhoneGap.

Each mobile app development platform has its own pros and cons. While choosing a platform, the design and the response time from the various devices are different, so we must make sure that the platform we choose is suitable in all the scenarios.