"I'm looking for someone reliable who can build a great app for me, but I don't have the budget for native development on two platforms."

Barry, Owner, Senior Consultant
Barry has worked with clients and agencies to build complex B2B applications using Cordova/Phonegap. He recommends Cordova/Phonegap to clients with multi-platform aspirations and limited budgets and works to design and build the best app experience possible given the constraints of web technologies running on a mobile device.
Sometimes you don't have the project budget to build and maintain a slick native app (for iOS, Android, AND Windows Mobile), but you still want your app to sit on your customer's mobile phones and take advantage of some of the key features of native development, including push notifications. The current best answer is to build either a Phonegap or a Xamarin app (so-called hybrid apps) that can share the same code and deploy to all platforms (this is where the cost-savings is). The downsides are that none of the interfaces are going to be as good as if you build it in native, and the apps tend to have a very "webby" feel. But, if budget is king, then hybrid apps give you what you need.
Project budgets for Phonegap apps vs native apps can be 30%-60% cheaper, get delivered faster, and ultimately are easier to maintain and require less specialized knowledge. This holds true for most situations, however the more demanding the design aspects of your project, the more likely that hybrid apps are a shortcut that is not worth taking. But, how can you know where the line is? Just ask yourself this question: "If I could build this using web technology which would just require my visitors to pull out their phones and navigate to my website pages, would I be happy with the design constraints of that?" If the answer is yes, your project is likely a good fit for Phonegap/Xamarin.
Caveat: From experience, I've found that there is second question you need to ask yourself in deciding to build a Phonegap app is "Does this app ever need to work totally offline? And if so, how complex does it really need to be?" There's a couple of reasons for this: 1) If the app never needs to be offline, then you might as well use web-technology to build the central piece of the app and just wrap it in Phonegap, and 2) if it the app is somewhat complex, then javascript (which is the underlying engine for these hybrid apps) gets to be a bit of a maintenance hog and its hard to get it built just right. It turns out that the more likely your app needs to work totally offline, and the more complex your operations, the more likely that is is a safer alternative to switch to native. The complexity line is hard to determine without some experience, so reach out to someone who knows their stuff.
Hi, I'm Barry. It turns out that I'm a solid Phonegap developer with tons of native app development experience. If you're serious about building an app (which can cost thousands of dollars), then I'm happy to talk to you anytime and answer whatever questions you may have. If you want to hire me, I'll build you a proposal that gives you a broad range of choices and budget levels to accomodate your needs.