Unsupported plugins

What happens to my app if a plug-in i use stops being supported or gets removed by the author?

You have three options:

  1. find another plugin
  2. fork the plugin and upgrade it yourself (or pay someone else to)
  3. find another way of solving the problem.

Unfortunately, this is a problem with plugins. Someone writes one and then takes a new job or moves on to other projects and they abandon the work they created. Other times the mobile OS changes and breaks the plugin and there is no workaround. The native-settings-plugin is one of these. Prior to iOS 10 you could pick any number of native settings to open and this made a great experience for the user. Apple killed that off and now you can only open settings and the user has to know where to go to make the needed changes. There is nothing the plugin developer can do to fix this.

That’s what i feared. Thanks.

Which plugin are you struggling with? On PGB or Voltbuilder?

I’ve been using a Zebra Bluetooth printer plugin on PhoneGap. I just learned that PhoneGap stopped being supported and so I’m transitioning to VoltBuild. No problems yet. I’m just planning ahead. I realized I’ve been a bit naive about the volatility of these things.

Yeah, plugins are probably the greatest argument for writing native code. I hate when one plugin updates to a later version of ‘x’ and another version is still on ‘y’ and x and y can’t work together and the plugin developers start pointing fingers at each other. Thankfully, the plugins are far more stable so we don’t run into those issues like we used to.

As for migrating over to voltbuilder, many of us have already done so and for a system that still being developed it’s remarkably good and far superior to PGB. I doubt you’ll experience any problems or, at least, nothing that’s not fixable.

I used volt in the past, before i started using PhoneGap builder. I remember with Volt, if i would make a change, the phone app would update automatically the next time it was opened. Not so with PhoneGap. Can i expect that kind of automatic updating again when i move to VoltBuild?

Short answer is no.

Voltbuilder is a drop-in replacement for PGB with some major differences:

In the later years, PGB was based on cordova but Adobe made some changes to it in order to accommodate some of their legacy stuff. About 18 months ago they pretty much dropped all pretense of supporting that legacy stuff. They dropped support for the phonegap project completely and laid off or disbanded that entire group and very quietly converted the PGB servers to Cordova engine instead of the old phonegap engine. The last major PGB update was to avert a Android/Google Playstore crisis. They have done no updates since then and apps built with PGB will not be accepted into the App Store because the app store requires a later version of the iOS SDK than PGB supports. At this point I doubt there’s even anyone at Adobe who has the technical expertise to update PGB.

Seeing this coming the kind folks behind AppStudio developed their own cloud build service. Not being hemmed in by years of legacy systems they were able to start from scratch and build both iOS and Android version of the Cordova CLI in the cloud. So, basically you’re getting a build pretty similar to what you would get if you built locally.

There are some differences though. For instance pre and post build hooks are a no-no. This is necessary to prevent security violations and protect all of us from someone’s malicious code. Otherwise this is just like building locally with the CLI except we don’t have to do all the tool chain maintenance (a real pain in the butt!).

Thanks for the background.
I’ve been very happy with AppStudio and I’ll be glad to have my project all in the family. The support here is exceptional vs PGB which was non-existent

I think the guys behind AppStudio genuinely care about helping their users and then as others like you and me get onboard we tend to jump in and help. I see people who were new here 8 months ago jumping in and helping now. It’s actually pretty nice.

We really appreciate when people jump in and help on this forum. We’ll be the first to admit we don’t know everything. The collective knowledge of the members here is amazing.

Thanks to all who pitch in here!

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