I am equally productive with web as well as native development so it makes no difference to me. Not surprisingly, Phonegap never appealed much - same work, inferior results, single (but dubious) benefit: cross platform.
I was pleasantly surprised by Titanium mobile though when I had to evaluate it at my job 2 years ago. I set to reimplement one of our (non-trivial) apps and summarize my experience. I ended up writing 50% less code and it took about the same time as what I had spent on the native version. I consider this a compliment though as I was completely new to Titanium. On the flip side I was completely new to the app when I wrote it the first time :-)
The build/run/debug loop was unpleasant but I've heard that it has improved since then. As for performance, it was good - Titanium generates native UI, albeit with an interpreter in the middle.
I was quite surprised when it turned out that I have a 99% identical app. You see, from the very beginning I decided that I'll be hard on Titanium, my goal was no-compromise, high-fidelity clone. And it worked. The only problem was positioning a tooltip near a touch point - at the time there was no way to traverse the view hierarchy. But then again, maybe I could have implemented it in a different way.
I realize a lot has changed since than, but this is my 2 cents - sharing a real world/product experience.
Titanium has come a long well, I eval'd it around 18months ago and was frustrated with 'how the heck do I build something that doesn't leak'. I was amazed at how quick I got something running, until it crashed... I hugely struggled with the best way to build an app.
12 months later, the SDK has improved, and documentation has improved. I circled round to Titanium again. Now I've got an app in my spare time that's pretty close to store submission, not leaking, not crashing, all native. I'd find it very hard to go past Titanium now. Once you get into a groove with the CommonJS style (https://wiki.appcelerator.org/display/guides/CommonJS+Module...) of constructing your app, and follow some of the latest examples, it all clicks into place.
I haven't tried to learn Objective-c (Rails/Javascript guy) however if you're not building a game, or trying to get 10/10ths out of a native app, I think it's damn good solution.
I disagree with the "if you're building a game" part. I build games in JavaScript/HTML5 for iPhone/Android, package them to apps using appMobi and it works pretty good. I haven't tried PhoneGap though but I guess it's more or less the same thing.
Sorry I should preface it with 'if you're building a game to squeeze all resources out of a system'. As obviously there is a (pretty small) overhead with running the interpreter..
I was pleasantly surprised by Titanium mobile though when I had to evaluate it at my job 2 years ago. I set to reimplement one of our (non-trivial) apps and summarize my experience. I ended up writing 50% less code and it took about the same time as what I had spent on the native version. I consider this a compliment though as I was completely new to Titanium. On the flip side I was completely new to the app when I wrote it the first time :-)
The build/run/debug loop was unpleasant but I've heard that it has improved since then. As for performance, it was good - Titanium generates native UI, albeit with an interpreter in the middle.
I was quite surprised when it turned out that I have a 99% identical app. You see, from the very beginning I decided that I'll be hard on Titanium, my goal was no-compromise, high-fidelity clone. And it worked. The only problem was positioning a tooltip near a touch point - at the time there was no way to traverse the view hierarchy. But then again, maybe I could have implemented it in a different way.
I realize a lot has changed since than, but this is my 2 cents - sharing a real world/product experience.