Hello,
I am a bit confused, I need to build a mobile app, my choice of technology was PhoneGap but I am not sure if any of the PineGrow framework work well for mobile development.
Apart from Angular, anything else can be used from Pinegrow to build a pure mobile app please(using phonegap).
Thank you.
Things like:
Each utilize HTML, CSS, JS at their core, so theoretically you can use Pinegrow as part of your workflow to get to the build process. But presently there are no direct inherent built in features within Pinegrow for those frameworks, such as specific GUI tools etc.,
With time I suspect integration may be added for something, as its logical given the HTML/CSS/JS foundations.
In the meantime you can review the following video by user @itsmeleo . It may prove useful to you in some way. However it uses an older version of Pinegrow so the UI will look very different.
“How to Create hybrid Mobile apps using Pinegrow Web IDE , PhoneGap, Cordova and HTML/CSS/JS”
Hello,
Thank you for the reply.
I have checked the video, unfortunately, this man uses ratchet which is really not that good for hybrid apps.
I am not sure I understand your first explanations, if I open my framework7 project in Pinegrow, will I see the fields to drag and drop on the left side? That’s all I am after, being able to create a layout with grad and drop.
Thank you.
You’re welcome.
Not until something is actually integrated.
All the drag and drop features are for frameworks that are currently already integrated, for example BootStrap, Foundation, etc., Feature Request - Perhaps with time a mobile app framework such as one of those will be brought into Pinegrow as well with some direct integration.
Thank you for the reply, yes this would make pine grow super powerful as most of us now create Hybrid apps, therefore this feature is a must-have in Pinegrow.
I ended up using framework 7 and cordova(dropped phonegap).
Pinegrow would have been great with this framework which seems to be very popular among mobile developer(I received a lot of advice from contacts).
Thanks for the update on how you got on with your workflow in the end @Bennyboy. Do you still use Pinegrow for any other things, or for any other part of this Mobile App dev workflow or does it not have a place in that for you now?
I would love to still use Pinegrow but so many of my customers moved to mobile only designs(less and less websites…just APIs) that I have stopped using it unfortunately as it is not mobile friendly enough 
OH, that’s interesting to know. Very. I wouldn’t have thought of that. Cheers for the Feedback, I shall go off and check that all out now. I’m just checking out the Ratchet plugin now. I’d seen it mentioned on the previous related posts, but didn’t realise that @itsmeleo was the dev of that plugin. He is a great guy! He was part of the PineGrow dev team for a while too and is very knowledgeable and helpful. I Will check him out later, see what he makes of all this mobile API web stuff 
but he is not very active here any more. He is sometimes on the Pinegrow slack channel too, but I don’t use that too much, as Slack just deletes your older posts once you hit 10,000 (which doesn’t take long now there are over 2500 users) so you only ever have a rolling content of that many messages. Anything useful should really be moved to a forum for longevities sake. Oh, and they just keep dropping support for older versions - which means, if you run an older OS, and cant run the newest, shiniest Slack app then - you’re SOL and suddenly cant communicate with your friends/team. - with no other option.
Bad Business Practice.
ok cheers for the update, I’m sure the PineGrow devs will find it interesting too.
I have already checked on Ratchet, unfortunately it is a poor framework for mobile development.
You do not even have a basic left/right slider menu because Ratchet seems to be focused on web style.
A Framework like Framework 7 has a lot of gadgets(check it out on their website), things like page init(what do you want to happen each time someone loads a page), as you dive deep into your hybrid app, you will need things like Loaders, page init, routers, page restriction and more, without these features, you cannot create a good app. Framework 7 is also compatible with Jquery, Vue, React native(I think)
For example my Android app uses a Laravel API for the back end, Laravel admin panel, OAUTH2(passport feature of Laravel), multiple accounts(in the app itself) with different user rights to access the API resources and also live update of reports, and others. I have also sqlite installed and many other APIs like Google map(it was a lot of work). So using a Ratchet framework would not be a good option in this case. I also tried to build a simple app using it, but it does not have great layout features.
One thing you have to be careful with, is the access of resources, the first mistake I did was to only hide my buttons in the app when the user had account level 1,2 or 3, but with time I realized that when the front end of the app crashes, jquery may not hide or show certain buttons, so you find yourself having to add a second layer of security which is the blocking of certain pages when the user does not have the rights(appinit from framework 7). With time, you find yourself having to add the exact same security in the API resources to limit the access of your data to only certain account types. After 9 months of work on that, I have learned a lot of things(just learning by my own mistakes really…great fun!).
What happens to mobile-only designs when folding phones become mainstream? We’re going from big screens to small screens back to big screens again.
Thanks for that awesome, in depth reply @Bennyboy!
Lots of food for thought there for the future, thanks, will save this.
I think the size of the screen won’t matter, the problem is the architecture behind it. ie: If you want your hybrid app to launch on an Android, you have to build it as an APK file. Also you need special plugins to communicate from your hybrid code to the native sensors and all the various parts of the phones. That’s why hybrid apps are generally slower and more demanding CPU wise. You will also have to deal with Memory leaks(more than in native) that can be really tricky to troubleshoot with hybrid app work(great tool in Chrome for this by the way…I did not even know we had this in chrome).
To be honest building an hybrid app vs building a website is totally different. On a website you can hide your API keys and so on in your PHP backend code, in an hybrid app, everything can be reversed engineered, it is really a headache.
To be honest, I used to prefer them this way, just used a pure phone. Nowadays, you can’t even get into a restaurant without one of your friend messing around on a phone…it is becoming bad…
I make it a point to turn my phone off when I go out to eat with friends. I can’t stand people who can’t put the damn things down for an hour. Maybe it’s because I’m on a computer all day long, but getting a break from technology for an hour or two is a treat to me.
I still have three of my old vintage flip phones, including a Motorola StarTac!