A few days ago, Adobe finally officially announced the end of PhoneGap Build. You can read the announcement on the Adobe I/O blog.
I want to first thank the entire PhoneGap team for everything they have done over the years! PhoneGap Build has been a big part of my professional life for a long time. I gave several workshops on it at Adobe MAX, used it as the foundation for my Intro to Mobile Development course at UCSD, and recorded training for LinkedIn Learning. This simple web service could take my HTML, CSS, and JS and create an app I could run on a phone, bypassing so many headaches of getting a local build to work as almost magical. If you want to see how hard it used to be, try finding some of the original instructions for setting up PhoneGap to work in Xcode.
I knew the end of PhoneGap Build was coming for some time, but could not formally say anything. The PhoneGap team had either left Adobe or was on to new projects. It was only a matter of time before something would break the ‘Build’. I tried to be as clear as I could on the Adobe forums to people, “It was time to move on.”
Now PhoneGap is not truly dead. When Adobe bought Nitobi all those years ago, what they really bought were two things; the PhoneGap name and the Build service. The code that is PhoneGap was given to the Apache Foundation and is alive and well as Cordova. So one option is to transition from building with the PhoneGap Service and begin building locally. I will have a guide for this ready in a few days. Another option is to migrate to one of the maintained services that do the same task. I have long been a user of the Ionic Framework, and they have a service, Appflow, which can fit the bill nicely. I wrote a migration guide for that service which you can read here [].
I will be still hanging out in the PhoneGap forums at Adobe for a while, trying to answer questions where I can. Otherwise, look for me hanging out on the Ionic Forums.
Thanks, PhoneGap, and let’s keep pushing the web forward!
Prototype A 