创建适用于Android的位置跟踪应用：本机还是phonegap？

Question

We need to create an app, which works for time tracking of the employees as well as location tracking. We only want to program it for Android, but we don't have any Android skills.

Therefore phonegap came as a great alternative. But there are several questions, to which I can't find a clear answer in the web.

• If the phone is in standby mode, can the phonegap-app still send position data? Would this still be phonegap standard or do I need to use plugins?

• the smartphones will be very simple and cheap. Is there a higher risk, that the phonegap application gets closed by Android to free memory then for a native app?

Alltogether, could it be recommend to invest the time to learn Android or would it be better to stay at our language JS?

Answer 1

It's perfectly feasible to write a location tracking application using phonegap and have it a) work in a performant manner on low spec android phones and b) keep the app running in the background when the phone is in standby mode.

To keep the app running in the background on android, it's necessary to acquire a partial wakelock (see android powermanager ). In phonegap, you need to use a plugin to achieve this. On the plus side, there's an existing phonegap plugin to do this. The downside is that in order to use a custom plugin, you will not be able to use the convenient phonegap build method to build your app, so will need to do the manual process via the Eclipse IDE, but this is not a great hassle to set up (see here ).

In terms of your app getting closed because of android running out of memory, and also having it perform responsively on cheap, low spec devices, this won't be a problem so long as you are careful to write your javascript code in an optimal way. I've implemented a location tracking app using phonegap which uses custom maps and in testing on older android devices including HTC Desire and HTC Wildfire, performance was acceptable and the partial wakelock worked - I had no problems with the app getting closed because of lack of memory.

I chose phonegap over native because I'm a web developer so Javascript is more convenient for me than having to start from scratch with Java and the android SDK, and also because I was able to use the same JS code base with appropriate plugins to produce the same app for iOS. Phonegap is able to access GPS hardware on the device and in testing outside I found the average accuracy to be between 4 to 8 metres depending on the device. Hope this helps!