As mentioned previously, a PhoneGap application is a "native-wrapped" web application through the web browser native widget that most of the mobile development SDKs provide as a part of their UI framework (this widget is known as WebView ; for more information go to http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/uikit/reference/UIWebView_Class/Reference/Reference.html and http://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebView.html).

In purely native applications, WebView controls are used to display HTML content either from a remote server or a local HTML package along with the native application in some way. The native "wrapper" application generated by PhoneGap loads the end developer's HTML pages into one of these WebView controls and displays the resulting HTML as the UI when the application is launched. One of the benefits of this approach is that since the app functions offline, there is lower latency for retrieving assets, and available bandwidth is less of a concern. When developing a PhoneGap-based app, it's enough to open the index.html file directly from your filesystem to get the optimal PhoneGap development workflow; even better, open the index.html file with Ripple and check the behavior of the app on several platforms.