Is there a way to develop for mobile apps that isn't painfully slow?

mobile
1

Any method I use to debug mobile apps seems to be painfully slow. I’m not doing anything mobile specific. I could easily just run the code in a browser to see if it works, but at the end of the day, I do want the code to be for cordova only.

Any advice on how to go about doing this? I’m adding a mobile app to an existing web project, and the slowness is every time I make a change it seems like it takes 5 minutes to build everything, and often I have to restart the app to get the changes.

Thanks

2

I don’t know if I’m understanding you well but you don’t need to “rebuild” and wait for 5 minutes to update your App everytime you change something. You can just change your code and Meteor will change it in your App directly using the “Hot Code Push”…

If you use

 meteor run ios-device --mobile-server yourapp.meteor.com
 meteor deploy yourapp.meteor.com

maybe you have to wait too much for the build + upload + hot code push. But you can always run your app pointing to localhost so every change made in your desktop will be pushed faster to your App.

In addition, I develop using Google Chrome with the “mobile emulator”, with gives me a good approach of how my app will look like in the mobile.

3

Thanks for the reply.

Using the mobile emulator on my laptop always seems to break. The only way
I manage to do anything is debugging on an actual phone, and using the hot
code push doesn’t run quickly. It takes a while to update after every edit
and often doesn’t seem to update unless I delete the app from the phone and
restart the whole process again.

How does the chrome mobile emulator work. That would be the best solution
for me. I don’t need to debug on an actual phone. I just need quick updates
and an idea of what things look like.

4

Thanks for the reply.

Using the mobile emulator on my laptop always seems to break. The only way
I manage to do anything is debugging on an actual phone, and using the hot
code push doesn’t run quickly. It takes a while to update after every edit
and often doesn’t seem to update unless I delete the app from the phone and
restart the whole process again.

How does the chrome mobile emulator work. That would be the best solution
for me. I don’t need to debug on an actual phone. I just need quick updates
and an idea of what things look like.

5

Take a look to this link: https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/device-mode

6

How do I visit the Cordova app through the browser though?

7

I’ve noticed the build times really start to slow development. I think the meteor team might want to look into it. I hate adding a single console.log and waiting 10 seconds for everything to rebuild.

There must be some way to expedite build times, especially when someone is only changing a single file that doesn’t effect the overall scope.

8

I prefer to view the site on mobile, and use Remote Debugger in Chrome - https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/remote-debugging

9

So really my problem is that I’m trying to add a cordova app to an existing site. I’ve just started a new project that uses the meteoric package and I’m developing like a Web site so I don’t need to debug on a device or emulator. I’ll share the server, collections and other common code between the two projects as others have done. This speeds up development a lot.