Blogs

I’m very exciting to be finally sending out beta invites to a lucky few folks to kick the tires on our new baby. It’s been a long time coming! PhoneGap Build our new service that let’s developers compile or build their PhoneGap based apps in the cloud. Our goal is to eliminate the need to download and configure the half dozen or so different SDKs requited to build native/installable for today’s world of smartphones. In a nutshell you upload HTML/JS/CSS as zip or from a Github project for your app to Build.PhoneGap.com, wait a couple minutes and then download the appropriate apps for your phones. From there you can test on your device or distribute into an app store. Something like this:

This is just the very early alpha beta blah blah thing startups do. We’re going to be letting folks bit by bit to keep an eye on performance and work on addressing bugs and scaling for the next while. So if you don’t get a beta right away I apologize. Our goal is to have broader access to the app by the end of the month. Although, this cloud compile service has been our plan from the beginning…yes we wanted to do this back in 2008 when we launched we had a lot of work to do on the PhoneGap framework itself to get to this point. It feels like good timing in our industry where cross platform mobile is an acknowledged significant issue and cloud based development tools are quickly gaining traction.

We’ve had a few nice words by folks like Jonathan Stark, Jeffrey Hammond, Michael Mahemoff and James Governor. Thanks it’s encouraging!

We’re always happy to hear feature requests and ideas so fire them our way. Be sure to stay tuned on Twitter: @phonegap. Big shout out to Andrew Lunny and the rest of the team working on PhoneGap.