PhoneGap Desktop App Beta

The coolest thing about the PhoneGap Desktop app is that it uses the PhoneGap Developer app to update the app across all of your devices at once as you make changes on the desktop. Just download the PhoneGap Developer app to each of your test devices and with a few simple steps it will mirror your changes on the desktop.

This app is still in its infancy. You still need to use the CLI (Terminal commands) to do the heavy lifting. However, the developer feedback section on GitHub is in full swing as new features are being added every week.

Note that this app uses Adobe PhoneGap commands, not Cordova.

Adding an Android APK Expansion File to a Cordova Project

Google Play apps are limited to 50MB, but may go larger with “expansion files” of up to 2GB in size. The “main” expansion file is the primary expansion file that contains additional resources required by your application. The “patch” expansion file is optional and intended for small updates to the main expansion file. This article covers how to create and add an expansion file to our Android app using a plugin. Then gives the “secret” way to upload the APK and expansion file to Google Play.

Adding ProGuard to Your Android Cordova Project

“The ProGuard tool shrinks, optimizes, and obfuscates your code by removing unused code and renaming classes, fields, and methods with semantically obscure names. The result is a smaller sized .apk file that is more difficult to reverse engineer” (from http://developer.android.com/tools/help/proguard.html). You’ll want to use this tool if your app has sensitive security features you want to protect. To my knowledge, it does not obfuscate your HTML.

These steps assume you’ve already built your Android Cordova project and just about finished it, and are ready to build a release version of the app.

Using PhoneGap CLI 3.6.3 Commands

Here is a rundown on the phonegap commands you can execute with version 3.6.3 PhoneGap CLI (command-line interface) using the Terminal or console.