The exponential growth of the use of mobile apps has given birth to billion dollar businesses. These businesses are icons of success and serve as inspiration for the newer ones. As a result, there are many more evolving businesses which target the mobile users. This is why the need of cross platform app development framework like Phonegap entered the scene. In this article, we will discuss the best practices you need to follow in Phonegap. Now, when it comes to best practices, there are two important things to consider: performance and security. We will discuss both of them one by one.

Performance

When it comes to application development, performance is one of the key factors that affect the success of the application. Here are some important things you need to consider to ensure the best performance.

Caching

In any web application, loading the content is probably the most important part of the app for the user. The user judges the app’s performance according to the parameter like loading speed. So, you have to ensure that your app is smart enough to display content quickly. To achieve that, you will have a proper strategy to cache data that is frequently used by your application.

Images

If your app uses a lot of images, it can slow down your app’s UI. This occurs because the image is scaled to fit the UI your app is using. But, the good thing is you can avoid scaling of images by obtaining the pre-scaled images from the server.

Touch events

The click event in Phonegap has a delay of 300ms and it does not look native. This is why touchstart and touchend events should be used. But, the problem with touchstart and touchend events is that they are not supported in all devices. This should be taken care of.

Animations

You should use CSS transitions that are hardware acceleratsd instead of JavaScript animations. The CSS transitions perform better on mobile devices.

Scrolling

Scrolling layouts are one of the most popular and widely used layouts in any app. But, as Phonegap is not the native app development framework, most of the time the lists will be slower in response. Therefore, we recommend you to use the native scrolling. In case your list is too long try loading it partially and loading the rest if needed. This will make scrolling lists smooth. Also, there are many loader libraries to achieve it.

Testing

Before uploading your app to any app store, you should ensure that you test the app on as many devices as possible. If it works perfect on a particular device that does not mean it will work on all devices. So, testing is most important.

Security

Due to the large number of apps available to millions of users across the globe, there are huge amounts of data processed each second. In such a data intensive environment, it becomes your duty to secure your app for the smooth running of your business. Here are some points to keep in mind while securing your app.

Secure your source code

Phonegap uses JavaScript. As you know, JavaScript is not compiled – it is a good idea to obfuscate the code to such an extent that it becomes unreadable. There are some tools to do that. Uglify is a tool that can be used to minify the JavaScript source code before submitting it to the app stores. Also if you want more reliability, you can consider using Jscrambler. Jscrambler is a paid service that takes the code beyond obfuscation. This offers more active protection to your JavaScript assets. You can see an example of code obfuscation by viewing the source code of google.com homepage.

Limiting the code exposure

You can follow these practices to limit your code exposure:

  • Reducing the access to core Cordova plugins from your app.

  • Use the InAppBrowser Cordova plugin that uses the device’s native web security tokeep the content away from the app.

  • Using TouchID plugin for iOS 8 and above for user authentication.

Loading JavaScript code from a remote server

This is yet another way to separate the JavaScript assets from the app. In this procedure, your app loads the source code from a remote server and not from within the app. But, this method can be made much more secure if you add API authentication to it.

Coming to the conclusion, you cannot completely secure any application. But, if you follow these steps, you can get some peace of mind. The same applies to performance too. No app is completely bug-free due to the dynamic content arriving daily. But if you follow the above rules, your app can achieve user’s trust. Thank You.

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