Some of the answers are misleading. So i will write my answer here.

Cordova and Phonegap are one and the same thing. Consider Cordova as Open source version of Phonegap. Both of these tools allow us to package any HTML, CSS, JavaScript into native mobile installers like apk or ipa. It means you can use any web tool with it. Example bootstrap.

Ionic is a web UI framework specially targeted at Cordova/Phonegap developers. It is set of UI Components and services that allow us to create beautiful mobile apps. Think of Ionic as Bootstrap for mobile apps.

So it also clarifies that Ionic is not based on Cordova/Phonegap. It uses Cordova/Phonegap for creating apk/ipa.

I hope i answered your question.

Performance and stability.

Phone Gap, Cordova, and any other run-time interpreted mechanism is not as fast as something that runs native.

JavaScript plugins developed by third parties are what are required to get to native APIs such as the camera, Bluetooth, etc.

Xamarin IS native, not just some wrapper for objective-c and java. These bits run natively on the device and require no run time interpretation.

C# is also type safe. Phone gap and Cordova interpret JavaScript at run time. While powerful, JavaScript if coded poorly can have some pretty unexpected results. That foundational approach, while excellent in its abilities, makes me more likely to use something that it type safe, if I am able.

My team has a Xamarin Forms app in production, available in the App Store and soon to be in Google Play. This app is fast. The same thing in JavaScript is noticeably slower.

As a programmer you will have to ask yourself few questions before choosing the right direction for your app.

1. Are you building a quick POC?
2. How customized is the UI?
3. How much are you expecting from the app performance?
4. What's the deliverable time line you are looking at?
5. Any hardware features that may need native access?

Cordova can wrap up an app that runs in a WebView that has additional native extentions, which is the definition of a hybrid app. Cordova is the open source platform that the original PhoneGap became.

Ionic Framework is based on Cordova, comes with a set of standard controls that mimic native controls, and Ionic comes with Angular. Using Ionic with Angular can help you organize your app and give it a solid look. Ionic also includes bindings to the Ionic services. See Ionic.io for more information.

PhoneGap at this point is based on Cordova, but is more of a distribution of Cordova with few custom packages and tweaks. Adobe also provides a build service.

Titanium is not, contrary to popular opinion, a hybrid solution. The original Titanium did use a WebView and therefore was hybrid, but they ditched the WebView some time ago. It is a full native solution that is scripted with JavaScript. It's more like Xamarin, but using JavaScript instead of C#.

To be complete, NativeScript and React Native are cross platform development environments that feel somewhat like hybrid, in that they use web frameworks or view layers (Angular 2 and React), but they don't rely on a WebView, and are therefore native approaches that simply rely on JavaScript instead of the native language on each platform.

Xamarin:

1. Native, no cheating – this is native. But there is an overhead, it isn’t like ObjectiveC native. The apps are going to be larger – this minor stuff matters when you are trying to get the max oomph out of your very resource restrictive mobile device.
2. You still need a mac :-)
3. A huge emphasis on better app patterns like MVC or MVVM, because user interface is still native. You can write about 70% reusable code using Xamarin, but the last 30% or more depending upon your app design and nature, has to be native.
4. Hey you just bought into Xamarin. Some companies don’t like that, they’d rather deal with Microsoft or Apple or Google. I don’t have an issue with Xamarin, but some larger clients do.
5. Your dev. life gets pretty complicated, and you need an experienced Xamarin expert to guide you through structuring your product code nicely, or you will see steam come out of your ears and your devs self combust over time.
6. Generally speaking, in my experience, I’ve had better luck finding support and code samples for native, than for Xamarin. This is balanced with the fact that I am working in Visual Studio and C#.
7. And like I said, you still need to know ObjectiveC and Java – even if you are using Xamarin.
8. Perhaps the biggest advantage of Xamarin – you can use C# and Visual Studio for a large percentage of your app. And visual studio is hands down the best Dev IDE.
9. And Visual Studio + Xamarin = $$$$$. Plus a Xamarin developed product, while superior than HTML5 and Packaged HTML5, is going to cost you more. You have to evaluate if your needs justify the cost.
10. Have to go through AppStores, will work with MDM, can tap into native capabilities.
11. Harder for IT departments to manage, not impossible but most IT departments are grappling with the steep learning curve. Unfortunately many are too cool for school and are trying to solve Mobile with a Windows Desktop like mentality :)
    
    Full reference: HTML5 vs. PhoneGap vs. Xamarin vs. Native

I have developed with Xamarin and PhoneGap.

If you are developing using Xamarin, that mean you are making native apps. That mean:
- More reliable and flexible.
- Native performance.

But with Xamarin you will have to know some native library to use them, also lack resources and support because everything was by paying before Microsoft made Xamarin free.

For hybrid mobile apps like PhoneGap and Titanium ... You are developing using HTML5, CSS and JQuery mobile or AngularJs. That less performance sure because it is not native like Xamarin.

And i found it's faster to build hybrid mobile app rather Xamarin taken little bit much time.

And for the learning curve: learning Xamarin is much longer than learning hybrid mobile apps.

And nowadays hybrid mobile development became very popular and added many new features and functionality that where not targeting before.

I've never done serious iOS development, but I have made a PhoneGap app that's in the iOS app store and for a short time was in the Google Play store (we pulled it because some android devices were not rendering our app properly - You have to test a lot android devices).

I consider myself well-versed in web development, and I was excited about the features that PhoneGap brings to web apps. Going the HTML5 web app route seemed like the most sane route.

Pros

• You don't have to learn any new languages if you're already a decent web developer
• It's very quick to prototype
• Though we didn't end up using it, jQuery mobile is pretty neato and makes it even faster prototype
• Lots of library options for pretty much everything you could possibly want
• It's really cool and fun
• If you so wanted to, you can bypass the app store by hosting the files on a server, and utilize app cache to make things speedy. Changing your app is just changing a web page and its cache manifest file
• Managing images for multiple devices is a lot easier with CSS and media queries than it is for an iOS xcode project and an Android project with its ldpi, hdpi, xdpi, and whatever dpi.
• Easier to create vector graphics to design spec
• Hell, it's just easier to get things to be exactly like the design (except if you care about cross-browser compatibility)

Cons

• There are a lot of mobile browsers out there (the state of browsers is worse than its ever been in terms of how many different crappy ones we have to support - it used to be just ie, but guess how many people are on android 2.x)
• There are a lot of mobile devices out there with varying hardware, screen sizes, and network speed
• Some features you're used to using aren't there for all devices (position: static for instance) and since those are likely the crappy devices, using a javascript shim (like iScroll) is out of the question if you care about performance
• There seems to be some version issues with the facebook-connect plugin for phonegap (cordova) and the latest versions of phonegap on iOS only - To get facebook connect and PhoneGap to work I had to use an older version of PhoneGap
• Documentation for PhoneGap itself is pretty decent, but it's still new, so not a whole lot of people have reliable information on current versions (at least this was the case 3-4 months ago)
• Since I had to use an older version of PhoneGap, I found that some of their api functions would cause javascript errors. I had to bypass the sugar they provide and call PhoneGap.exec directly on their com.phonegap.whateverFunctionality - It was ugly, but it worked
• There are complications with linking to other apps like Google maps
• I found that saving contacts did not work on all versions of iOS
• jQuery Mobile + Backbone is more of a pain in the ass than you think
• Getting neato transitions can be a pain
• There are less facilities in javascript for modularization of large-scale applications than Objective-C or Java
• Testing sucked - not as much anymore http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/shadow/

I feel like the cons outweighed the pros in the end. However, armed with this knowledge, we wouldn't design our mobile app the same. For instance, we wanted a similar experience to native with a statically positioned header and footer navigation. If cross-browser compatibility and performance are a concern, you do not want to do this. I would also avoid heavily rounded corners. Android 2.x doesn't do so well with it.

If your app is simple, then I recommend it. I really did enjoy the process and seeing my web app as an installed app. But, just know that it is more trouble than it appears to be.

PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova. So Apache Cordova serves as the engine for PhoneGap just like WebKit – an engine that powers Chrome and Safari.

• PhoneGap was previously a product of Adobe.
• To keep it open-source always and follow standards, PhoneGap codebase was handed over to Apache.
• At Apache, it got a name change as Cordova.
• And now it’s better known as Apache Cordova.

So, they are same cross-platform frameworks with different names. The most important to understand here is that “PhoneGap is powered by apache Cordova. PhoneGap is Cordova plus some extra Adobe stuff”.

Cordova will always remain open source and lets you create apps that are native to Android, iOS and Windows using web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript.

And PhoneGap offers the same cross-platform environment as Cordova. So, currently the difference lies in the names of the same framework, with a catch that PhoneGap services are owned by Adobe and many not always be open-source and free-to-use.

Ionic is a powerful HTML5 SDK that helps you build native-feeling mobile apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Ionic mainly focuses on the look and feel, and UI interaction of your app.

Ionic simply fits well in (PhoneGap or other Javascript Framework) projects in order to simplify one big part of your app: the front end.

Ionic currently requires AngularJS in order to work at its full potential. While you can still use the CSS portion of the framework, you'll miss out on powerful UI interactions, gestures, animations, and other things.

They will be releasing Cordova/PhoneGap plugins in the future to expand the capabilities of your apps.

I would select react native because it has the smallest learning curve for me.

Cordova and Phone Gap are nice, but ultimately are more to learn.

React Native is automatically a partially finished learning process because it is based on react browser. More importantly, There is just a more active community around React Native so if I do have any questions, there are people who can help me.

I really appreciate Cordova and Phone Gap paving the way, but React Native has the least friction, so it is what I’ll choose.

If you had zero experience with React, the playing field might be a little more even, I don’t know, for me, it is React all the way because I already know it.

Phonegap

This is the most popular cross-platform framework for mobile hybrid application development. From the team behind Apache Cordova, the Adobe PhoneGap framework is an open source distribution of Cordova framework. With Phonegap, you can reuse existing web development skills to quickly make hybrid applications built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for multiple platforms with a single codebase so you can reach your audience no matter their device.

Apache Cordova can be extended with native plug-ins, allowing developers to add more functionalities that can be called from JavaScript, making it communicate directly between the native layer and the HTML5 page. These plugins allow access to the device's accelerometer, camera, compass, file system, microphone, and more.

Link: http://phonegap.com

Ionic Framework

Ionic Framework is a complete open-source SDK for hybrid mobile app development. Built on top of Angular.js and Apache Cordova, Ionic provides tools and services for developing hybrid mobile apps using Web technologies like CSS, HTML5, and Sass. Apps can be built with these Web technologies and then distributed through native app stores to be installed on devices by leveraging Cordova.

Ionic Framework is a 100% free and open source project, licensed under MIT. It will always remain free to use, powered by a massive world-wide community. They have over 120 native device features like Bluetooth, HealthKit, Finger Print Auth, and more with Cordova/PhoneGap plugins and TypeScript extensions. You can use their CLI to create, build, test, and deploy your Ionic apps onto any platform. The framework has Ionicons icon pack with hundreds of the most common app icons. MIT licensed, and ready out of the box. And you can develop your apps by Live Reload because to compile and redeploy your app at every step of development is for chumps. And there are more useful features like deep linking, AoT Compiling, Ionic Native.

Link: https://ionicframework.com

source:10 Frameworks for Mobile Hybrid Apps | Jscrambler Blog

I'm not sure if developers loves it as much as product managers. It sure sounds like a great thing if you can reduce overall costs significantly by having one team work on one code base to target a multitude of platforms.

When you build apps with Cordova, however, you will learn about the quirks and limits you have to work around on each platform. It's a huge task that requires extreme care for every platform and it's differences. The most apparent one is user interface. This must differ greatly between platforms so that it matches customer expectations. Thinking that you can serve the same layout will do nothing good for you. Often this ends up in a lot of conditionals which makes the code a lot less readable.

I've been a Cordova developer for a great amount of time now, and it works well on small teams where you simply don't have the resources to split development into different platform branches. But it has some clearly defined limits that you will need to work your way around. Sometimes, when everything clicks, it feels great to push something to your web version of the particular app and then you just know that your iOS or Android code base follows along already. That's the magic of it.

All the answers provided the pros and cons already in details, so I would just add couple of points.

• PhoneGap / Cordova is good for prototype, or internal business applications that are add-on to business and not part of the core business. If app is your main business, then you better go native, as there is no comparison with the native experience and performance.
• Cordova is also good if your team is coming from web development background and core skills are html/css. This way, web developer can build the screens, without worry about too app native work.
• Cordova is also good if your app functionality can be achieved using out of the box features. Anytime, you need custom feature not available in the PhoneGap, different effort and experience is required.
• You can do everything with PhoneGap / Cordova that you can do in Native. If there is no out of box functionality, or some plugin does not work as per your need, you can always create your own, or update the existing, as its open source. However, writing plugin or updating is not for everyone. In one of our project, map was not behaving as required, so we had to write our own plugin for this purpose. We actually got the project for same reason, and previous developer gave up because of the same reason.

I hope this helps.

When compared to frameworks like Ionic, PhoneGap, and Cordova, React Native is a better choice in aspects of app performance, its appearance, debugging, compilation, interpretation, etc.

RN makes use of natively rendered UI. It makes use of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc. The animations are smoother and the apps have a better UI and UX.

App’s business logic is handled by JavaScript code that elevates the performance and speed of the apps. Also, RN supports the just-in-time process of manufacturing which eases the interpretation and compilation process. When it comes to debugging and rectifying the errors, React Native has a simpler process.

For all such reasons, RN is widely preferred and every React Native app development company is in high demand. It is not only cost-effective but also delivers performance-based apps.

They all are hybrid mobile app development frameworks.

Coredova also referred as Apache Coredova, is open source JavaScript framework which helps you to build mobile apps with capability to access the device hardware. However you need HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, JQueryMobile, Sencha to build the UI. Coredova can not be used to build UI of a mobile app. It complements other web technologies which are used to build mobile apps.

Phonegap is propitiatory version of Coredova maintained by Adobe. It just provides some more extra add-ons on top of existing Coredova.

Ionic is combination of HTML5 and Coredova. You can think of it as a full stack framework for building cross-platform mobile apps.

To understand various ways of implementing mobile apps you can have a look at

from my YouTube channel - Codetutor.

Well, frameworks like Ionic, Cordova, and PhoneGap are commonly used for developing Hybrid applications as they are considered to be a cost-effective solution. But when it comes to attractive user-experience in the apps, these frameworks may not be up-to-the-mark. In this case, React Native comes in the picture. React Native app development services are highly preferred as compared to other frameworks mentioned above due to this major difference. This framework uses native controls and modules which gives a native-like appearance to the apps. Its UI is more native than the UI of WebView. Due to the use of native components, the animation quality of the app also improves to a certain extent. Also, the React Native apps have a rich UX and deliver a robust performance. On top of that, this framework cost-effectively allows speedy development, due to which it is used by several organizations on a large scale.

I hope this answer was helpful to you. For more information on React Native, kindly read the article by clicking The most frequently asked Questions on React Native! (Part-2).

If you have good grip over native programming for mobile OS, like android - Java, iOS Obj C and some little knowledge of Javascript, then its not that difficult.

I am gonna describe how to communicate Js to native and native to js for iOS.

I am assuming you have prior understanding of xcode, obj c, javascript, UIWebView etc.

1. Javascript to Native,

Lets say you want call a Objc function using js,

Javascript Part -

window.location= dummy-js-call + "myObjCMethod";  
 
//will change location of window, that will trigger UIWebView Delegate, 

Native Part -

- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)webView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType  
{ 
 
    if ([[[request URL] absoluteString] hasPrefix:@"dummy-js-call:"]) 
    { 
       //Check which method to call, by simple string comparison, 
       // Call your Obj C metohd, 
 
       [self performSelectorOnMainThread:@"myObjCMethod" ]; 
    } 
} 
 
-(void)myObjCMethod 
{ 
//do something native 
 
} 
  

2. Native to Javascript

Native Part -

There is in-built mthod provided by most of all major Mobile OS browser to evaluate javascript.

This is just one line of code in you are done.

For instance, iOS,

[webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"myJavascriptFunction"] 

Of course, here you can pass argument as well.

Javascript Part -

function myJavascriptFunction() 
{ 
 
//do something javascript 
} 

This analogy applies to other mobile platform as well.

I am mobile applications developer, but I don't like to use PhoneGap platform.
Its not in terms of developers perspective, but from Product development perspective, its one app development that runs on all the platforms of mobiles. Because the apps are built around HTML5 and Java script. If any modifications are to be done in the app, just by fixing it in one time, the solution is ready for all other platforms. The development cost is another reason which will remove multiple native apps developers. At the same time if the product owners are not aware of the development technology being used, all the companies will make huge profits. Apart from that there's nothing PhoneGap can do different from other environments.

When it comes to cost-effective hybrid app development, frameworks like PhoneGap, Cordova, Ionic, etc. are considered to be the right fit. But when it comes to high-performing apps that have a native feel React Native is one of the best choices. Let us explore why:

• With React Native app development, one gets 100% native UI as this framework uses native components and works directly with native APIs. As a result, it enhances the way the apps look and perform.
• It does not require WebView which gives it an edge over other frameworks.
• ​This framework also provides better offline support to the apps and they can work fine despite poor internet availability.
• It has smoother animations and an animated library while in other frameworks, these features are much difficult to implement.

We have seen how RN is better than other frameworks in several aspects. Do you know any other benefits of RN? Please let us know your thoughts in the comment section.

Phonegap apps are nothing more than HTML/Javascript stand-alone apps that are wrapped in some native code that allow access to native features that you wouldn't normally have available as a "web" app. I quote web there because although these apps are going to be built on HTML/Javascript, they won't live on the Internet, they are in the Phonegap-wrapped package/app.

So to answer your questions...

Will Phonegap take care of everything? Well, just Phonegap no. Phonegap give you a framework to build an HTML5/CSS3/Javascript app and a bunch of native projects (iOS, Android, WebOS, etc.) that you can put your html/css/js app into and customize. By customize, I mean things like add various icons (for example on iOS you might want both a regular resolution icon as well as a retina resolution icon), naming the app, the launch screen image, etc. These things setting are different for each platform so you have to do this yourself.

Then there's Phonegap Build (https://build.phonegap.com/) which is a service that you can upload your html app and it will make the various builds for you. I'm haven't used it.

As for your question on "fine tuning" for each phone, I'm not sure whether you mean performance of the app or details of platform specific settings. If you meant the later, I think I answered that above. If you mean performance, that's a fast moving target as things are changing. For example, all the platforms are getting faster (http://www.sencha.com/blog/apple-ios-5-html5-developer-scorecard http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-benchmarks-windows-phone-browser-against-iphone-4-and-android-wins/) but some things are crazy slow and some have platform specific hardware acceleration techniques so one might want/need to write platform specific html5/css3/js apps.

Or perhaps you meant "fine tuning" in terms of the platform specific UI paradigms. For example, on the iOS it's common for the "navigation" bar at the top to show a back button when you have a parent view (e.g. the view details of contact view has a back button to the full directory view). On the other hand, this back button is almost never there on the Android platform and Android users habitually press the back button for this function. And Android specifies that this is the way devices and apps should work (http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/source.android.com/en/us/compatibility/4.0/android-4.0-cdd.pdf see Navigation Keys section).

As for your final question of using a "language that works in every platform," are you referring to things like Adobe Flash Builder? I'm not too knowledgable about those and I would love an overview of that topic myself (especially the performance and stability of the produced apps). But I imagine there are similar UI challenges in dealing with difference platforms with difference device/os/user interaction guidelines.