What is your experience with using native ui in phonegap apps, steroids.js and similar?

Question

phonegap

Phonegap/cordova is good when you want to create your own cross-platform application as quickly as possible, but the cost is lags and brakes. You can make decent prototypes with phonegap, but if you need to add transition animations / any kind of interactivity, then it already becomes sad.
There are also attempts to use native ui in phonegap-based hybrid apps. One such attempt is steroids.js . Alas, this particular implementation has several drawbacks, one of which is fatal for me personally .

• the code of the native part is closed. The plans of the developers have thoughts about separating everything into separate libraries, but something tells me that if this happens, it will not be in the next year
  
• Build projects only through the cloud-service. Everything is simple here, I do not want to trust such a project assembly process to a third party.
  
• Weak Android support. Due to the closeness of the source code, nothing will be added.
  
• forcing Coffeescript. This is already a matter of taste, but I do not like it when the developers of a library / tool provide by default only what they are used to working with.
  

Attempts to implement some pieces of the application, like uinavbar for ios natively in phonegap projects, are far from a new thing. But I couldn't find anything relevant. There are unfinished sketches dating back to 2010, there are discussions, but nothing is ready yet.
So finally let me ask you a question, have you had any experience of using native ui in phonegap projects? Was it limited to rendering the menu natively, or was it something more complicated? Have you met ready-made solutions to some common problems and so on.

Answer 1

There is an experience of using PhoneGap WebView in a native application.
It's better to do a hybrid using WebView using addJavascriptInterface() , describing the interaction between WebView and native code yourself (get the same Steroids).
For example, the Odnoklassniki application for Android is done this way, it is a ~95% native application with a WebView and a JavaScript bridge around it.
Performance is many times better than applications on PhoneGap.
Dig in this direction: developer.android.com/guide/webapps/webview.html
Pages are best stored on the device, and the data in them is updated via REST.

Answer 2

I have 1.5 years experience with phonegap. And I can tell you for sure that it is almost impossible to achieve such smooth operation as native applications. Even if you try to do this using the native parts of the interface, you will have to write code for each of the platforms separately. And this just contradicts the very ideology of phonegap`a.

Answer 3

No one is forcing you to write steroids in coffeescript.
The only place where I saw it is in the project settings file.
Even the guides and examples in the documentation are in pure js.
I myself developed an application on steroids using backbone on js.

Answer 4

Although I haven't played around with PhoneGap too much yet, I have used angularjs in conjunction with Apache Cordova (which powers PhoneGap).
Here is a really great article, which helped me to get started:
The Definitive Guide to Angular on Mobile
Also, the last few days I've been playing around with Intel's new XDK and it is really helpful for making this type of development a bit less cumbersome (or so it seems so far).
www.agileinfoways.com/technical-expertise/cross-pl...
I've recently been using the Ionic framework and it is fantastic. I like it enough that I decided to come back here and add a link to it since it brings Cordova and Angular together perfectly.
Also I would start with this example that uses phonegap, angularjs and topcoat:
coenraets.org/blog/2013/11/sample-mobile-applicati...