Can we make Home replacement App in PhoneGap?

Question

I want to make an home launcher replacement application (eg Nova Launcer or Go Launcher) using PhoneGap. I've read about PhoneGap plugins but I don't think this feature can be implemented through Plugins. So is it possible to make a home launcher replacement App?

Answer 1

There's already such a project. You can take a look at this project.

https://github.com/AricwithanA/DOMLauncher

It is a launcher made with phonegap.

Answer 2

The answer to your question is "yes". Phone Gap is just a WebView inside a Java Android project. If something doesn't have a Javascript interface, nor has a Phone Gap plugin yet, you can just make one yourself, or you can just use Java/Android xml directly.

The real problem with using a WebView as a homescreen is that it will really be slow (with no apparent benefit otherwise of loading all the capabilities that normally come with a WebView).

For a project like that to make sense, a cool project you could try doing is to replicate some of the iPhone functionality that's talked about here .

[...]

I expressly endorse this request, as it is not possible to offer a native-looking WebApp in Android at the time without implementing a shallow hull of an App, containing just a WebView (or implementing one of the popular Frameworks like PhoneGap or apparat.io).

This leads to the point where you have to pay 25 USD for offering a native-looking WebApp on Android. The same thing is free on iOS devices - and more elegant

In that case, it would actually make sense of using a WebView. Anytime you would have to deal with actual web content, it makes sense to use a WebView because a WebView does a lot of that html rendering/parsing work for you already.

On a side-note, the web site owner I quoted above is slightly wrong about having to pay $25. In Android, he could just have self-signed his own app and distributed it through his web site, although, his main point remains: iOS does do the bookmarking/installing of a web app locally much better than Android, and it would be great if we could get something like that on Android (that could save/install locally the web sites that were especially made for iOS).