This is an excellent summarization and well reflects my own experiences building mobile apps with Phonegap. I found that while Appcelerator is an interesting platform, it takes the developer too far away from the core capabilities of the mobile device. By this I mean that you have many options using their custom JavaScript API, but you get little control over the final product.
Conversely, while I ended up using Phonegap for a couple of published apps, I quickly ran into the limitations inherent of that framework. One big example was the desire to play video (either remote or local). The feature simply doesn't exist in the framework.
Despite the lack of features in some aspects, phonegap is still my preferred framework because it's extensible. I get the benefit of rapid development using html5, CSS, and js while being able to edit or add objective-c code where needed to make extra stuff work.
My final conclusions were that Phonegap is good for phase 1 apps or apps that are relatively simple. Native apps are the way to go if you expect high performance.
What PhoneGap does (expose Javascript APIs for direct hardware/native library access) isn't very difficult, so if you needed to you could add-on for anything PhoneGap is missing. The real value of PhoneGap is that they've done this work on a bunch of different devices, and set up dev environments for each of them. That's a lot of coding you don't have to do if you need to support many devices.
Conversely, while I ended up using Phonegap for a couple of published apps, I quickly ran into the limitations inherent of that framework. One big example was the desire to play video (either remote or local). The feature simply doesn't exist in the framework.
Despite the lack of features in some aspects, phonegap is still my preferred framework because it's extensible. I get the benefit of rapid development using html5, CSS, and js while being able to edit or add objective-c code where needed to make extra stuff work.
My final conclusions were that Phonegap is good for phase 1 apps or apps that are relatively simple. Native apps are the way to go if you expect high performance.