How Android JS Is Different From Other Frameworks/Libraries ?

3 min readApr 22, 2019

In this article, I’ll try to explain How Android JS is different from other frameworks like: Cordova, Phonegap and other hybrid app development frameworks.

Discussion

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What is Hybrid apps ?

Hybrid apps are just simple apps which are built using Web Technologies like : HTML/CSS, JavaScript

What is Android JS ?

Android JS is an open-source framework developed and maintained on GitHub. Android JS allows for the development of Android applications using front and back-end components originally developed for web applications: Node.js runtime for the backend and Android Webview for the frontend. Android JS framework can be used to android apps with frontend technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

What is Cordova ?

Apache Cordova, formerly known as Adobe PhoneGap, is an open source framework for creating cross-platform hybrid mobile applications using web standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Cordova has been around for many years with a lot of resources available on the internet. Additionally, there are a lot of plugins available to enhance your application.

So let’s talk about How Android JS is different ?

let’s discuss the app architecture of Android JS

This is the architecture of Android JS

Here you can simply see that there is a Node JS runtime environment provided by Android JS, which means you can use any NPM packages in your app .
Android JS provides two process Back Process and Front Process
— Front Process is just views of your app, you can make them in HTML/CSS , Angular , Phonon Framework , Onsen UI , Vue etc…
— Back Process is the main process of your app which communicates with Node environment.
In order to make communication between Back and Front process, Android JS provides IPC (Inter Process Communication).
Android JS provides various Native Android Libraries like: Notification , Toast , Call , SMS , etc…
Android JS provides Browser Libraries as well like: Camera API , Microphone API .

Now let’s discuss the app architecture of Cordova

This is the architecture of Cordova

Cordova provides the Front Process which is nothing but just the views of your app, you can make them in HTML/CSS , Angular , Phonon Framework , Onsen UI , Vue etc…
Cordova provides various Browser Libraries like : Notification , Camera , Microphone, etc…
Cordova does not provide Native Libraries .
Cordova does not provide any Back end support but you can build API based app , which fetches the data from server using API’s .
Cordova is just for Front end with Browser API's .

Conclusion

No matter what, each framework has its pros and cons. It truly comes down to what you’re comfortable with and what your application needs are. In the end, both are great options for creating and debugging cross-platform apps.

Android JS provides Back and Front both processes, while Cordova just provide Front process only.
Android JS provides Node JS runtime environment inside your app, while Cordova does not provide such kinda facility at all.
Android JS provides Native Android Libraries as well as Browser API's , while Cordova only provide Browser API's .
Both frameworks are Open Source .
Both have various Front end frameworks to work on.

Cheers !

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