Adobe announced it is ending the development for PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build. PhoneGap was created in 2008 to give mobile app developers a way to easily create web and mobile applications with a single codebase.
Since 2008, the industry and market has evolved and PhoneGap usage has declined.
“In the context of these developments and declining PhoneGap usage, Adobe is focusing on providing a platform that enables developers to build, extend, customize and integrate with Adobe products,” the company wrote in a post.
PhoneGap Build will be discontinued on October 1. In addition, Adobe will be ending its investment in Apache Cordova.
According to the company, Apache Cordova will continue to exist, and users can also transition to Ionic, or alternative products such as Monaca, Framework7, NativeScript or Progressive Web apps. Additionally, PhoneGap will continue to be free and open source, but it won’t be actively worked on. Eventually, Adobe explained that PhoneGap tooling will become incompatible with the latest version of Apache Cordova.
“As the pioneer of hybrid app development, aka web developers building mobile apps, this is truly the end of an era,” Max Lynch, co-founder and CEO of Ionic, wrote in a post. “But one thing that hasn’t changed: web developers want to build web apps and run them everywhere. They want to use their existing skills, browser-based development process, web libraries, and code to build mobile apps.”
