Are mobile apps written with RubyMotion on par with the native equivalent? For example, I've heard a lot of people dislike PhoneGap, AppAccelerator, etc because the final app isn't as polished as something that is built natively.
I would assume that the process for Android is much different than iOS or OS X. In the latter cases, the ruby is compiled to the same "stuff" that objective-C is compiled into. As for Android, I'm not totally sure. My experience with some apps written using rubymotion (http://www.rubymotion.com/apps/) they seem to run very fluid on my iphone 5s. The original product was macruby which was exclusively for writing OS X apps using ruby. My understanding is that that framework produced great results which spurred the continuation to iOS and now Android.
I'm a "full-stack" web developer using mostly rails these days. I've only begun to try out rubymotion but it seems fantastic for someone like myself. In my nights and weekends , I am continually working on my own startup. Releasing any sort of mobile app was daunting, particularly on iOS. I have some Android experience but zero Objective-C. Phonegap and "the like" just didn't seem to deliver a product which would even satisfy my definition of "MVP". I could be wrong but that is just my impression. In fact, Phonegap turned out to be significantly more complex to figure out than I expected. When I found rubymotion, I had some basic apps written, which were hitting live API's I had created. They aren't simple but they are legitimately native, so they have the ability to run smooth and fast.
My hope is that a lot of what I write will be usable on both iOS and Android but at first blush, that might be difficult to pull off. Maybe someone will create a framework which sits on top of rubymotion which allows you to create one app which compiles down to both an .apk and whatever iOS needs? hahahah. I laugh but someone probably already is working on it.
> The object model of RubyMotion for Android is based on Java. Ruby classes, objects, methods and exceptions are Java classes, objects, methods and exceptions, and vice-versa. No bridge is involved.
You're still coding to the same native APIs, but you're doing it in Ruby. That's how RubyMotion works on iOS/OSX as well as Android now.
