On behalf of one of our clients, we’ve been doing some number crunching on the mobile market in recent weeks. One byproduct of that research was confirmation of a rise in interest in PhoneGap.
PhoneGap itself has observed the same. These recently posted slides indicate massive growth in web traffic, both onsite and at GitHub, accelerating mailing list traffic and a spike in application creation.
Our data indicates similar interest and traction.
First, we explored the relative traction rates on StackOverflow of projects associated with mobile.
As you can see, PhoneGap is outpacing other mobile projects from a mentions perspective within the Stack Overflow community. But what about Hacker News?
As you can see, the data is similar. PhoneGap interest and traction is accelerating.
We also performed a rudimentary sentiment analysis on the various projects using Twitter’s standard API.
Before we get into the results: this is a small, non-random sample, so it cannot be considered representative. It’s useful for informational purposes only. With that said, PhoneGap’s relatively positive performance here is unsurprising given their increased adoption.
What you’re looking for in this chart is skew: are the bars higher on the left (negative comments) or right (positive comments)? And how far do they go, which is a different way of asking, when people said good or bad things, how many good or bad words did they use?
As you can see here, PhoneGap is positively skewed, and had the most positive tweets (those with a net of 5) of any project included.
When you consider the metrics, then, and the fact that PhoneGap is aimed at a problem in mobile platform fragmentation that is getting worse by the day, it’s clear that it’s a project worth tracking.
Disclosure: PhoneGap is a RedMonk customer.
