> > A better approach in general would be to have regular surveys asking > people to submit: > - vendor url, vendor contact, appname, platforms, usage count by platform, > list of plugins they use, with a score for how happy they are for each > platform/plugin. > > I agree we should be looking at surveys. That said, I do not feel surveys are a good way of driving product design. They are a tool but not the whole picture.
> If you don¹t build it, they certainly won¹t come. > Let¹s try building it and see who comes. > Yeah, some cheap/easy/quick survey's could be useful for contextualizing some decisions. > PhoneGap build should be able to survey the things it We do. And we also do extensive implicit analytics such as how many builds a platform gets. Sharing that information would be dangerous to the goals of the project. Oh look, many people are just building for Firefox OS. Guess we don't need to support iOS anymore. Or something like that. ;) > Ideally Cordova would be able to reach its consumers and talk to them. I do. I think many here do too. > Without having this information, Cordova really can¹t usefully sit at the > W3 table, as it clearly has absolutely no idea about what people are doing > and thus clearly has nothing to provide to W3. This is leading a little severe. We implemented geolocation before any browser did. That turned out to be a pretty ok thing! I easily spend more than half my time helping people with downstreams of Cordova. We most certainly have a very clear picture of what platforms matter, what APIs people are using, and what APIs they may need in the future. Most of our architecture has been driven by real use---not surveys or pie-in-the-sky ivory towers designed by Enterprise Architects. That said, we can definitely do a better job of getting visibility into these things as a project. My only caution is that information is kept private to our group for the sake of burgeoning platforms and to encourage project diversity that makes teh web so resilient to proprietary traps. We all have a lot to contribute back to browsers and the web. Indeed is why we're all here working on Cordova today.
