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  4. Cross Platform Mobile Development
  5. Material Design Lite vs PhoneGap

Material Design Lite vs PhoneGap

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

PhoneGap
PhoneGap
Stacks578
Followers685
Votes94
GitHub Stars4.0K
Forks889
Material Design Lite
Material Design Lite
Stacks697
Followers394
Votes62
GitHub Stars32.2K
Forks5.0K

Material Design Lite vs PhoneGap: What are the differences?

What is Material Design Lite? Material Design Lite Components in HTML/CSS/JS. Material Design Lite (MDL) lets you add a Material Design look and feel to your static content websites. It doesn't rely on any JavaScript frameworks or libraries. Optimized for cross-device use, gracefully degrades in older browsers, and offers an experience that is accessible from the get-go.

What is PhoneGap? Easilily create mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. PhoneGap is a web platform that exposes native mobile device apis and data to JavaScript. PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova. PhoneGap allows you to use standard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development, avoiding each mobile platforms' native development language. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device's sensors, data, and network status.

Material Design Lite can be classified as a tool in the "Front-End Frameworks" category, while PhoneGap is grouped under "Cross-Platform Mobile Development".

Some of the features offered by Material Design Lite are:

  • Blog Template
  • Dashboard Template
  • Text Heavy Webpage Template

On the other hand, PhoneGap provides the following key features:

  • Android
  • Blackberry
  • iOS

"Material Design straight from the original creators" is the primary reason why developers consider Material Design Lite over the competitors, whereas "Javascript" was stated as the key factor in picking PhoneGap.

Material Design Lite and PhoneGap are both open source tools. It seems that Material Design Lite with 31.3K GitHub stars and 5.32K forks on GitHub has more adoption than PhoneGap with 4.15K GitHub stars and 974 GitHub forks.

WebbyLab, Binary.com, and Infoshare are some of the popular companies that use PhoneGap, whereas Material Design Lite is used by Google, Troopers, and Boxme. PhoneGap has a broader approval, being mentioned in 86 company stacks & 34 developers stacks; compared to Material Design Lite, which is listed in 9 company stacks and 26 developer stacks.

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Advice on PhoneGap, Material Design Lite

Aleksandr
Aleksandr

Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft at Microsoft-365

Dec 23, 2019

Review

What is Proguard?

ProGuard is the most popular optimizer for Java bytecode. It makes your Java and Android applications up to 90% smaller and up to 20% faster. ProGuard also provides minimal protection against reverse engineering by obfuscating the names of classes, fields and methods.

How to use it in Cordova app?

I didn't find any plugins for it. So I've implemented it by myself and shared it on GitHub.

Feel free to use!

119k views119k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

PhoneGap
PhoneGap
Material Design Lite
Material Design Lite

PhoneGap is a web platform that exposes native mobile device apis and data to JavaScript. PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova. PhoneGap allows you to use standard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development, avoiding each mobile platforms' native development language. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device's sensors, data, and network status.

Material Design Lite (MDL) lets you add a Material Design look and feel to your static content websites. It doesn't rely on any JavaScript frameworks or libraries. Optimized for cross-device use, gracefully degrades in older browsers, and offers an experience that is accessible from the get-go.

Android;Blackberry;iOS;Windows Phone;Windows8
Blog template;Dashboard template;Text heavy webpage template; Stand alone article template;
Statistics
GitHub Stars
4.0K
GitHub Stars
32.2K
GitHub Forks
889
GitHub Forks
5.0K
Stacks
578
Stacks
697
Followers
685
Followers
394
Votes
94
Votes
62
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 46
    Javascript
  • 13
    Backed by Adobe
  • 11
    Free
  • 9
    Easy and developer friendly
  • 6
    Support more platforms
Cons
  • 2
    Never as good as a native app
  • 1
    Not build for high performance
  • 1
    Created for web pages, not for complex Apps
  • 1
    Poor user experience
  • 1
    Hard to see
Pros
  • 23
    Material Design straight from the original creators
  • 11
    Based on bem philosophy
  • 9
    Nice animations
  • 7
    SCSS
  • 5
    Simple Material Design

What are some alternatives to PhoneGap, Material Design Lite?

Bootstrap

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.

Ionic

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

Flutter

Flutter

Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.

React Native

React Native

React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.

Xamarin

Xamarin

Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

Foundation

Foundation

Foundation is the most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world. You can quickly prototype and build sites or apps that work on any kind of device with Foundation, which includes layout constructs (like a fully responsive grid), elements and best practices.

Semantic UI

Semantic UI

Semantic empowers designers and developers by creating a shared vocabulary for UI.

Materialize

Materialize

A CSS Framework based on material design.

Material Design for Angular

Material Design for Angular

Material Design is a specification for a unified system of visual, motion, and interaction design that adapts across different devices. Our goal is to deliver a lean, lightweight set of AngularJS-native UI elements that implement the material design system for use in Angular SPAs.

NativeScript

NativeScript

NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.

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