Turn a website into a native app

Titanium, PhoneGap... best solution?

[iFelix]

Hello,

I manage a role play website which really need a mobile app.
It's simple pages with forms, drawings, buttons, text, and a little JS.

I'm looking for the best solution to turn this HTML/JS/PHP website into an iPhone + an Android app.

My criterias :
- Simplicty and portability (I'd prefere to code in JS and then have something 'converting it' to OC/Java)
- InApp purchase
- Ability to store the images directly on the devices

I've found a few solutions like Appcelerator Titanium or Adobe PhoneGap but I'm a bit lost. Is there a 'leader' that everyone uses ? Does it fill my requirements ? I'm thinking of going with Titanium but I don't want to get stuck.

Hope my english isn't too bad ;)

Thanks a lot for your help !
Félix.

[incrediBILL]

Why convert it to an app?

You can use one of those app generators that auto-loads a web page and then, while looking like an app, is actually the website.

Not a bad option to get started until you find a good solution to build a native app, if ever.

[ergophobe]

Sorry Felix,

I'm in the same spot with similar requirements... I've looked at Titanium and Phone Gap but just haven't gotten rolling.

There are also native development kits. On April 3 Google just released a new version (0.5.4) of the Android Studio. I tried a very early version and it was too buggy, but it was a fairly decent dev experience.

One of the stumblers for me is that the apps that I have been thinking of will require a lot of image storage (many megabytes) and must work without being connected to a network (which is why incrediBILL's solution is a non-starter and why I say our requirements are similar).

I wish I could be more help!

Tom
PS. I hope my English isn't too bad!

[iFelix]

@incrediBILL : I looking for a compromise between a native app and an automatically generated app.
First, my website partly relies on Allopass (you call a number, you get a code, you type it on the website) which is not really user-friendly.
Plus, I don't want the user to wait 10seconds for each page to load, I'd prefere to have a preloaded page on the mobile and then update the needed values with AJAX.

@ergophobe : Thanks for your message. I didn't know Android Studio. Maybe I'll just have to develop 2 native apps..

I'd really like to have feedbacks on Titanium and PhoneGap :)

[explorador]

Take a look at Mosync, it's supposedly in bankruptcy but works and I liked it a lot. It's free, mac and windows. Phonegap? having to use git and forced to upload then download and test? no thanks. And the others are just a ton of downloads.