What are the disadvantages of Cordova?

Depends on what you're building. Cordova, currently at stable version 13.0.0, still works fine for simple, form-driven apps, but its WebView rendering and its dependence on third-party plugins for device features make it a poor fit for anything animation-heavy or performance-critical.

When don't the drawbacks matter?

For a lot of business apps, the WebView tax barely shows up. Internal tools, form-heavy CRUD apps, content readers, and dashboards spend most of their time rendering static layouts and lists, not 60fps animations, so the performance gap next to a fully native build is small enough that users never notice.

Does plugin fragility actually break things day to day? Usually not, if you stick to the well-trodden plugins (camera, geolocation, file system, push notifications) that have years of community usage behind them. The trouble shows up with niche or newer device APIs, where plugin maintainers may be a single volunteer keeping things patched between Android and iOS releases.

Cordova also still makes sense when a team already has strong web skills and no budget for native specialists. Wrapping an existing responsive web app in a WebView shell is faster than rewriting it in Swift and Kotlin, and for low-traffic internal software that tradeoff is rarely worth revisiting.

When are they a dealbreaker?

Anything with animation-heavy UI, camera-based AR, gaming, or audio/video processing exposes the WebView bottleneck fast. Scrolling jank and dropped frames during transitions are the usual symptoms, sometimes paired with sluggish list rendering on longer screens, and no amount of plugin tuning fixes a rendering pipeline that isn't native.

What happened with Ionic and PhoneGap? Adobe discontinued PhoneGap, its commercial Cordova distribution, in 2020, and Ionic moved new projects to its own runtime, Capacitor, around the same period. Cordova kept going as a community-run Apache project, but the shift left it without a large commercial backer actively expanding its plugin catalog, which matters if you're picking a platform for a multi-year product.

Debugging is the other recurring pain point. Bugs can originate in the web layer or in the native bridge connecting it to the device, and tracing a crash across that boundary takes longer than debugging a single native codebase, especially once a team member without web background needs to touch the native side.

If your app needs smooth animation, heavy device I/O, or a roadmap stretching several years, look at Capacitor or a native/React Native build instead. If it's a simple internal tool your team can maintain in-house, Cordova's tradeoffs are usually livable.