Aligning Cordova and W3C device APIs

Earlier this year, members of the Cordova and W3C teams started a process to better align W3C and Codova specifications.

Indeed, Cordova (from which the Phonegap framework derives) is one of the major projects used to build hybrid applications — applications written in HTML/JavaScript but run as native apps.

Hybrid applications benefit from the widespread knowledge of Web technologies, their cross-platform availabilities, while allowing developers to get inserted in the native ecosystems (including their application stores).

As a bridge between the native and the Web worlds, they are an important component in our overgoal of making it easier for developers to embrace the Web as platform on mobile.

Unfortunately, while in many areas Cordova re-use Web technologies as-is, for a number of historical reasons, device APIs as made available in the Cordova framework have not matched the ones used in Web browsers, as illustrated in the mobile Web API fragmentation report that we introduced last month.

To fix that situation, we are now looking at getting existing Cordova device APIs to converge towards W3C device APIs as much as possible, while making sure that the feedback of the Cordova developers is taken into account in the design of these APIs on the W3C side.

We have started by doing a deep dive into the Vibration API, since it has proved reasonably stable from the W3C side, and is a reasonably simple API in the first place.

We have also started incorporating Cordova’s feedback on the battery API.

These are only the first steps, and getting this convergence to happen will obviously require more time and effort; but the path towards it is now open!